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

Abstract

AbstractEthyl 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.