Experiments and dynamic modeling of a reactive distillationcolumn for the production of ethyl acetate by consideringthe heterogeneous catalyst pilot complexities

Abstract

Great effort has been applied to model and simulate the dynamic behavior of the reactive distillation as a successfulprocess intensification example. However, very little experimental work has been carried out in transient conditions.The work presents a series of experiments for the production of ethyl acetate from esterification of acetic acid andethanol in a reactive distillation pilot column. The steady-state approach performed experiments with both excessof alcohol and stoichiometric feed configuration. Predicted and measured results show good agreement and reveala strong dependency of the structured packing catalyst activity on the pilot geometry and its operating conditions.The transient process behavior of the heterogeneously catalyzed system was deeply investigated and continuousand dynamic data were collected for an equilibrium model validation, after different perturbations on parameters.The experimental validation is shown to be essential to provide realistic hydrodynamic parameters, to understandthe sensitive parameters such as heat losses and to adapt values for the catalyst holdup as a function of the system