Transforming Ethyl Chloroacetate Production─Leveraging Reactive Chromatography with Amberlyst-15

Abstract

Esterification reactions are the archetype of equilibriumlimited reactions that can be advantageously conducted in multifunctional reactors (e.g., reactive chromatography and reactive distillation) to enhance the per-pass reaction conversion. Ethyl chloroacetate (ECA) is an ester utilized as a precursor in many fine chemical industries, produced by esterification of monochloroacetic acid (MCA) with ethanol (EtOH). This work explores the potential of employing reactive chromatography (RC) for the continuous production of ECA in the presence of ion-exchange resin, Amberlyst-15, as a catalyst and an adsorbent. A fixed-bed chromatographic reactor (FBCR) is used to evaluate the performance of the reaction, wherein Amberlyst-15 plays a dual role of adsorbent for the separation of water and catalyst to expedite the reaction. To mathematically model the system, relevant studies such as batch kinetic experiments at different reaction conditions and thermodynamic adsorption experiments in FBCR were performed to obtain appropriate parameters. This model is further validated with reactive breakthrough and elution profiles in FBCR. The model predicted and experimental results are found to accord reasonably well even for the regenerated catalyst/adsorbent bed. The experimentally validated RC model can be further used to design a simulated moving bed reactor (SMBR), which could prove to be competitive for the continuous production of ECA, if it is designed astutely and optimized well.