2. Industrial application of reactive distillation

Reactive distillation, which uses heterogeneous catalysts known as catalytic distillation, was firstly considered for RD [11], but it then remained uninvestigated and lacked research interests until the 1980s. However in 1980, with the advent of reactive distillation technology, Eastman Company tentatively carried out synthesis of high-purity methyl acetate. Later on RD was categorized as hybrid and nonhybrid columns [12, 13]. Hybrid RD is used to describe columns, which have separate reactive and separation sections, while the reaction takes place in the whole non-hybrid RD column.

After the success story of Eastman Company, several European countries and universities joined forces to work on a development strategy for reactive distillation process under the umbrella of Brite Euram project. Sulzer Chemtech has developed special structured catalytic packing for reactive distillation columns [14]. RD is an important method for many chemical syntheses which require recovery of chemicals such as recovery of acetic acid. RD uses cation-exchange resin for many liquid-phase homogeneous catalyst reactions such as butyl acetate synthesis and helps in separating catalyst during downstream processing. The investigation of many such reactions is reported [15–17]. Transesterification for synthesis and characterization of biodiesel from different raw material such as palm oil, mustard oil, etc. has been proposed but still not commercialized using various

Reactive Distillation: Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85433


Table 1.

Commercial application of reactive distillation.

homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. However, hydrodesulfurization of light oil fractions has been carried out commercially for diesel deep hydrodesulfurization.

CDTECH, the major commercial process technology provider, licensed up to now over 200 commercial-scale processes. Sulzer reports the commercial application of reactive distillation as synthesis of ethyl, methyl, and butyl acetate, hydrolysis of methyl acetate, synthesis of methylal, removal of methanol from formaldehyde, and formation of fatty acid esters. Commercial reactive distillation application with Katapak licensed from Sulzer is tabulated in Table 1.
