Non-catalyzed esterification by microreactor

What is it about?

Y-shape micro-reactor is designed, developed and implemented to investigate the effect of reactor miniaturization on chemical engineering kinetics, where, an esterification reaction of fatty acid (2- ethyl hexanoic acid) is considered as a case study. In order to investigate the differential change of micro-reaction conversion along the channel axis; a micro-reactor with multi-channel is designed in a manner that enables collecting the samples. The kinetics of esterification reaction of ethanol and fatty acid was explored under various operating conditions; Molar Ratio (MR) of ethanol to fatty acid at temperatures 25–65 °C. The conversion reached almost 99.3 % after 30 s at MR 4:1 and 25 °C. Steady and unsteady state axial dispersion mathematical models were developed; the latter approach resulted in fair agreement with the experimental results.

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Why is it important?

The novelty of this work is to perform the esterification reaction without catalyst, it may be developed by decreasing the depth of multi-channels in the micro-reactor to about 100 μm to intimate excellent contact between reactants, also the micro-reactor has three openings to study the reaction kinetics with time and along the channels.