Visualization of the ethyl acetate reactive distillation system

Abstract

Two important design implications for the esterification of acetic acid with ethanol in a continuous reactive distillation column were addressed. The visualization of stage calculations in several projected ternary spaces cut from the original tetrahedron composition space illustrated why it cannot produce pure ethyl acetate under the stoichiometric feed. It is counter-intuitive that the overall reaction conversion decreases as the reflux ratio increases. The ethyl acetate reactive system at 1 atm is illustrated. Filled triangles denote azeotropes. The brackets are for boiling points in Celsius degrees. The hatched surface and the dotted line represent reaction equilibrium in the original space and in the projected space.