Abstract:
To investigate the esterification reaction of amyl alcohol with acetic acid. This research is divided into two parts; experimental studies to find the kinetic rate of the amyl acetate esterification catalyzed by beta zeolite and simulation studies which is separated into two section; first, batch reactor, to compare between the results of the reaction of three catalysts; beta zeolite, Amberlyst 15 and Dowex at each temperature and second, reactive distillation which various process configurations and operating variables were investigated. All simulation results were based on the same product specification that the bottom stream contained amyl acetate with a concentration not less than 98 mol%. The commercial Aspen Plus program is used to simulate and their energy consumption and economic analysis are also investigated. For the kinetic studies, it was found that the Langmuir-Hinshelwood activity based model apparently shows the best kinetic model. The activation energy and the heat of adsorption of water are 73.71 and 40.95 kJ/mol respectively. From the simulation, beta zeolite showed the best performance in the batch reactor. The reactive distillation equipped with a decanter is a suitable column configuration. However, when considering the total annual cost for the case using Amberlyst 15 as a catalyst with 35 wt% acetic acid feed, it was revealed that the reactive distillation equipped with a decanter consisting of 1 rectifying, 15 reaction, and 6 stripping stages offers the lowest total annual cost.
