Production of ethyl acetate using catalytic reaction

The esterification of acetic acid with ethyl alcohol to produce ethyl acetate proceeds very slowly in the absence of a catalyst. In order to make the reaction faster, both homogeneous and heterogeneous acid catalysts can be employed. While mineral acids can be given as the example for homogeneous catalysts, the use of acidic cation exchange resin catalysts is becoming the new trend in heterogeneous catalysis. In this work the ethyl acetate production using a homogeneous catalyst and a heterogeneous catalyst were studied. For this purpose, sulphuric acid was used as the homogeneous catalyst and an inexpensive ion exchange resin locally available in the market was used as the heterogeneous catalyst. The homogeneous and heterogeneous experiments done in the temperature ranges from 322 K to 355 K showed second order reversible reaction kinetics. The activation energy for the homogeneous catalyst study was 45.7 kj.mol-1. In heterogeneous catalytic reaction study, a conversion of 62% was observed for acetic acid to ethanol mole ratio 1:1 at 335 K when 5 g of catalyst loading was used