Innovative process for fatty acid esters by dual reactive distillation

Catalytic reactive distillation offers new opportunities for manufacturing fatty acid esters, involved both in biodiesel and specialty chemicals. A key problem is the effective water removal in view of protecting the solid catalyst and avoiding costly recovery of the alcohol excess. This work proposes a novel approach based on dual esterification of fatty acid with light and heavy alcohols, namely methanol and 2-ethylhexanol. These two complementary reactants have an equivalent reactive function but synergistic thermodynamic features. The setup behaves rather as reactive absorption combined with reactive azeotropic distillation with heavy alcohol as co-reactant and water-separation agent. Another element of originality is the control of the inventory of alcohols by fixing the reflux of heavy alcohol and the light alcohol column inflow. This strategy allows achieving both stoichiometric reactant feed rate and large flexibility in ester production. The distillation column for recovering light alcohol from water is not longer necessary. The result is a compact, efficient and easy-to-control multi-product reactive setup. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.