“…In esterification processes, where the pervaporation unit is not integrated in the reaction unit, most of the articles report the use of commercial polymeric dehydration membranes (Benedict et al, 2006;Domingues et al, 1999;Sanz & Gmehling, 2006a;Sanz & Gmehling, 2006b), whereas in those processes where the reaction and the separation are combined in one single reactor polymeric, ceramic and polymeric/ceramic membranes are applied (Bagnell et al, 1993;Bernal et al, 2002;Peters et al, 2005;Peters et al, 2007;Zhu et al, 1996). As an example, the acetalization of ethanol with butanal was carried out using the second configuration, i.e., placing a passive membrane in a reactor (Agirre et al, 2011b) showing a good behavior. In this work a hybrid silica membrane (HybSi ® , developed at ECN) for dehydration was used.…”