Energy-Saving Investigation of Entrainer Enhanced Vacuum Reactive Distillation for Ethyl Acetate Production

An entrainer-assisted vacuum reactive distillation simulation is presented to synthesise high-purity ethyl acetate from acetic acid and ethanol. This process has the advantages of both heterogeneous azeotropic distillation and reactive distillation. Cyclohexane is used as an entrainer to break the water-ethanol azeotrope and extract water from the reactive part more efficiently. The feasibility of cyclohexane is evaluated using the residue curve map technique. The influence of various process parameters, such as reflux ratio, distillate to feed ratio, feed location of reactants and number of reactive stages on reboiler duty requirement, total annual cost, and purity of the product, were investigated. Comparison of EIARD and EIVRD configurations showed that EIVRD configuration showed 24.19% savings in reboiler duty per kg of product, 20% saving in total operating cost, and 6.59% saving in TAC.