10. Conclusion

This chapter gives details of reactive distillation as effective unit for various synthesis and manufacturing. The detailed case study envisaged to produce methyl acetate using methanol and acetic acid in a pilot plant reactive distillation column. The operating conditions were maintained as feed temperature of 50°C, column pressure of 1 atmosphere, feed rate of 0.03 L/min, and initial reboiler temperature of 70°C. The experiment yielded high purity of methyl acetate. We have succeeded in obtaining 95% purity of methyl acetate. The experimentation was then followed by simulations so as to contrast the results. The Aspen Plus simulation gives methyl acetate purity of 91.1%. This was followed by validation of results using sensitivity and optimization analysis. The optimized value of reflux was obtained as 4.69 and required reboiler duty 2 kW. The sensitivity analysis registered distillation-to-feed (D/F) ratio as 0.6275 and bottom-to-feed (B/F) ratio 0.4235 to obtain maximum product purity. These encouraging results establish a good agreement between experimental and simulation studies.
