Study of heterogeneously catalysed reactive distillation using the D+R tray—A novel type of laboratory equipment

Recently, novel equipment for heterogeneously catalysed reactive distillation, the D+R tray, has been introduced by Schmitt et al. (2009). The present work reports results of measurements of the separation capacity of D+R trays. Furthermore, results of reactive distillation experiments on two test systems are presented that show that the D+R tray can be used routinely for laboratory studies of heterogeneously catalysed reactive distillation. As test systems, the esterifications yielding butyl acetate and hexyl acetate were chosen. Reactive distillation using catalytic packings was studied previously in detail (Parada, 2008, Schmitt et al., 2004 and Schmitt et al., 2005) with the same test system. The experiments of the present work are carried out so that a direct comparison is possible. For both test systems, the most important process parameters such as feed rate and mass of catalyst were systematically varied. High conversions of the reactants and high purities of the products were achieved. The reproducibility of the results is excellent. The study shows that the D+R tray is a novel laboratory equipment that facilitates fast and flexible investigations of heterogeneously catalysed reactive distillation processes and that it can be used for studying process designs of columns equipped with either catalytic packings or trays.

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► Novel laboratory equipment for studying reactive distillation.
► Fast and flexible investigations of reactive distillation.
► Reactive distillation experiments with two esterification reactions as test systems.
► Comparison between novel equipment and catalytic packings.