Fixed Bed Adsorptive Reactor for Ethyl Lactate Synthesis: Experiments, Modelling, and Simulation

Multicomponent adsorption equilibrium data were measured through binary adsorption experiments performed in a fixed bed column packed with Amberlyst 15-wet for the ethyl lactate system, at 20°C and 50°C. A novel approach based on the multicomponent Langmuir isotherm was used assuming a constant monolayer capacity in terms of volume for all species, reducing the adjustable parameters from 8 to 5, for each temperature. Reactive adsorption experiments were performed and used to validate a mathematical model developed for both fixed bed and simulated moving bed reactors, which involves velocity variations due to the change of multicomponent mixture properties.