Methyl Acetate Hydrolysis in a Reactive Divided Wall Column

The combination of reactive distillation and a divided wall column leads to a reactive divided wall column. The first use of such a reactive divided wall column for the hydrolysis of methyl acetate is presented here. For the development of this system, kinetic data for the involved reactions was determined at the University of Stuttgart, mini plant experiments were performed at BASF and an industrial scale column with an inner diameter of 220 mm was run at Sulzer Chemtech. Results of one mini plant experiment and of one experiment in an industrial scale are shown.