Transesterification of methyl acetate with n-propanol: Reaction kinetics and simulation in reactive distillation process

The reaction kinetics of the transesterification of methyl acetate with n-propanol is described by pseudohomogeneous (PH) kinetic model, which can successfully correlate with the experimental data. The influence of temperature as well as catalyst loading and initial molar ratio of n-propanol to methyl acetate on this reaction is studied under the condition of eliminating both internal and external mass transfer resistances. On the basis of the PH kinetic model, the influences of design parameters are studied, such as recycle flow rate, the number of stages of the reactive distillation column (RD), and theoretical stages of the conventional distillation column. These parameters are further optimized to minimize total annual cost in the RD process.