The effect of the liquid-phase activity model on the simulation ethyl acetate production by reactive distillation

Abstract

Reactive distillation is an attractive way of improving process economics by combining distillation and reaction, especially for equilibrium-limited reactions such as esterification. Reactive systems are more nonideal than conventional ones, thus, they need elaborate models that consider the nonideality of the vapor and liquid phases. Among abundant liquid-phase activity models, modified versions of UNIFAC are cited as being well-suited for this purpose. In this paper, four activity models are compared by means of a simulation model applied to the production of ethyl acetate. It is found that the two versions of UNIFAC give similar results.