posted on 2017-03-28, 08:22authored byHue Tat Ronnie Teo
With ever-growing environmental concerns, petrochemical and fine chemical
industries face an omnipresent issue in recovering acetic acid from its
aqueous solutions. The recovery of acetic acid through the esterification
process is a very viable option. However, esterification reactions are typically
restricted by equilibrium limitations, and face challenges with product
purification. Reactive distillation is an emerging technology that has an
extremely attractive potential as a process alternative for carrying out
equilibrium limited chemical reactions. Although the reactive distillation
process has been successfully commercialised for the manufacture of hIgh
commodity chemicals e.g. methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) and methyl
acetate, its potential as a separation tool for the recovery of acetIc acid using
iso-amyl alcohol has not been exploited.[continues ...]
History
School
Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2005
Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.