Intensification of the Production of 2-Ethyl-Hexyl Acrylate: Batch Kinetics and Reactive Distillation

The reaction of acrylic acid and 2-ethyl-1 hexanol was explored in this work with the intent of process intensification. In order to assess the effect of important parameters on the course of reaction, this work initially conducted batch reactor experiments. Reaction conditions in the batch reactor for a specific conversion (~ 30 %) were obtained. A kinetic model was then obtained through regression to arrive at a rate expression that is later used in process development. Experiments were performed in the reactive distillation (RD) environment in batch mode, which showed substantial increase in conversion (~ 80 %) indicating the applicability of RD. Further, this work performed simulation in the RD environment to assess process intensification. Simulations show that it is possible to obtain complete conversion of the acid.