Esterification of ethyl hexanoic acid using flow-through catalytic membrane reactor

Abstract

Catalytic membrane reactors, as a promising novel technology, are widely recommended for car rying out heterogeneous reactions. If the reactant feed is forced to flow through the pores of a membrane, which has been impregnated with a convenient catalyst, the intense contact provides high catalytic activity with negligible resistance to diffusive mass transport. The synthesis of a fatty ester (ethylhexanoic ester) by esterification was developed by the Factorial Design and Response Surface Methodology (FDRSM). Selec tion of factors was based on the operating conditions that have a significant influence on the esterification process, namely temperature, molar ratio of ethanol to fatty acid, and internal surface area of membrane pores. Experimental results indicated that the optimum conditions (under which the conversion achieved 99.7%) were as follows: temperature of 30°C, molar ratio of 5 : 1, and internal membrane area of 252450 cm 2 . It can be concluded that the factorial design is an important tool to reduce time and to facilitate reaching opti mum reaction conditions.

Preparation and characterization of different geometrical shapes of multi-bore hollow fiber membranes and application in vacuum membrane distillation

“…The membrane is a selective physical barrier that permits the separation of certain species by the incorporation of sieving and diffusion mechanisms (Bernardo et al 2019;El-Zanati and Abdallah 2015). The membrane is potted into a casing unit to form a module.…”

“…The MBHF structure provides an improved mechanical strength required for different applications and development the membrane performance. Moreover, the MBHF membrane has high stability and durability compared with the conventional single-bore hollow fiber (Abdallah et al 2015;El-Zanati and Abdallah 2015;Haase et al 2017). The single-bore hollow fibers break and entangle during continuous operations, but the new generation of hollow fiber membranes of multi-bore configuration shows remarkable improvement.…”

Biocatalytic solutions to cyclomethicones problem in cosmetics

“…Several ethylhexanoates chemical synthesis procedures have been described in the literature, for example, 2‐ethylhexanoic acid esterification with ethanol in a flow through catalytic membrane reactor in which reactants are forced to pass through the membrane pores, where catalyst is placed . In this sense, the modified membrane was prepared by polymerization grafting of sulfonic groups on a polyethersulfone membrane.…”

Membrane Technology in Catalytic Carbonylation Reactions

“…Porous UF polyethersulfone (PES) catalytic membranes were realized by El-Zanati and Abdallah [22] for the esterification between ethyl hexanoic acid with ethanol for the production of ethyl hexanoic ester. Once the PES membrane was produced by a phase inversion technique, the catalyst, consisting in sulfonic groups, was grafted on the membrane surface following a three-step procedure.…”