Kinetics and structural design of ZSM-5@SiC foam catalytic packing in RD column for ethyl levulinate synthesis

Abstract

Reactive distillation (RD) column is one of the important equipment to improve the reaction conversion limited by the chemical equilibrium, however, the application in industrial scale is still challenging due to the lack of efficient catalytic packing with corresponding kinetics and separation performances. This work developed the novel catalytic packing consists of the structured ZSM-5@SiC foam catalyst and corrugated sheet, which is used in RD for the synthesis of ethyl levulinate (EL). The results of X-ray CT characterization revealed that the structure of ZSM-5@SiC has significant effects on the kinetics and performances of RD column. The kinetic of structured ZSM-5@SiC foam catalyst was measured, and a novel kinetic model was developed regarding the “structure factor” of ZSM-5@SiC catalyst. Furthermore, the structural design of ZSM-5@SiC in RD column has been firstly performed based on the developed kinetics that was incorporated into Aspen Plus embedded FORTRAN. The results demonstrated excellent performance of the designed ZSM-5@SiC (EL yield 37.65 % with energy consumption 3695 kJ/kg) are achieved. Such findings in this work could serve as a tool for further upgrading of structured catalyst and application of RD column with ZSM-5@SiC foam catalytic packing.