Inter-integration reactive distillation with vapor permeation for ethyl levulinate production: Equipment development and experimental validating

Ethyl levulinate, one of the main derivatives of levulinic acid (LA), is of significant potential as platform chemicals for bio-based materials. The esterification of LA was generally carried out in a conventional batch reactor or in a conventional reactive distillation column. However, traditional methods are hard to deal with equilibrium limited reactions and azeotropic issues. Therefore, the inter-integration reactive distillation with vapor permeation (R-VP-D) process, which integrated reaction, vapor permeation, and distillation into one single unit, is proposed in this paper and validated in the pilot-scale experiments. A comparative study is made between a pilot-scale RD column with and without VP module. Owing to the water-selective VP membrane and the ingenious design of related apparatuses, the R-VP-D process reveal a superiority in LA conversion of 21.9% maximum higher than RD without VP process and removing of product water about 53.6% from VP module, which indicates its promising industrial application in process intensification field.