Abstract
To shift from a petroleum-based to a biomass-based economy will require the development not only of biofuels, but also of biorenewable replacements for petroleumderived chemicals. In this regard, environmentally friendly biomass-derived esters may serve as alternatives to fossil-derived chemicals such as toxic halogenated solvents and glycol ethers. Therefore, esterification of various carboxylic acids that find significant applications in the chemical, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, food, and cosmetic industries has been initiated by the chemical industry. At atmospheric condition, esterification is a reversible reaction limited by the low equilibrium conversion and slow reaction rate, and has recently been performed with excess alcohol to shift the equilibrium conversion. Heterogeneous or homogeneous acid catalysts are used to achieve acceptable reaction rates. The conventional acid-catalyzed process has been extensively developed; but it suffers from problems associated with the generation of side reactions, corrosion of equipment, expensive purification procedures, long reaction times and discharge of acidic wastes. Various attempts on esterification of carboxylic acids with ethanol have previously addressed important issues concerning product distribution, catalyst activity, and kinetics of acid-catalyzed esterification at lower reaction temperatures, but kinetics of uncatalyzed esterification at elevated reaction temperatures are still very limited. It is thus of great interest from a practical viewpoint that more information such as kinetic and thermodynamic parameters are required to develop a possible esterification process without using any catalyst. In this work, therefore, a fundamental study on the uncatalyzed esterification of different aliphatic carboxylic acids with stoichiometric amounts of ethanol was
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