Vapor Permeation Aided Esterification of Lactic Acid Application of Pressurized Vapor Circulation System and T–type Zeolite Membrane

Abstract

The hybrid process of reaction with membrane separation has been increasingly attracting much attention. Thehybrid process is characterized by improvement of the conversion ratio, reduction in the reaction time, saving of theuse of raw material, and so on. The improvement of esterification was achieved by vapor permeation (VP)separationwith zeolite T membrane because of its extremely high permeation flux and acid resistance. We developed zeolite Tmembranes, which showed good stability to acid solutions as well as high membrane performance for water-organicliquid mixture.