In this study, a boric acid coated carboxymethyl cellulose composite catalytic membrane was prepared and employed in a pervaporation assisted membrane reactor system to synthesize ethyl lactate. The effect of catalyst loading, temperature, initial molar feed ratio and reaction run time were investigated to evaluate reaction and separation ability of the hybrid pervaporation catalytic membrane reactor (PVCMR) system. The reaction performance was obtained by using lactic acid conversion data. Separation performance was determined as functions of flux and selectivity. It was observed that the conversion increased from 51 to 71 % as the temperature increased from 55 to 75°C. The best result was obtained as 83 % at 75°C when initial alcohol:acid molar ratio was three. Also, it was seen that the catalytic membrane preserved 93.6 % of its activity. The system efficiency was evaluated by comparison of PVCMR data to simply batch reactor data under the same conditions.
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