Abstract
Direct hydration of 1-butene and isobutene has been studied on proton-exchanged zeolite catalysts in vapor phase. The conversion and selectivity of isobutene into t-butyl alcohol was very high around 383 K, while the reaction from 1-butene and water to 2-butanol little proceeded on these catalysts, as shown in Table 1. These results indicate that protonexchanged zeolites are suitable catalysts for the direct gas-phase hydration of isobutene. The correlation between isobutene/water molar ratio and yield of t-butyl alcohol was also examined and an appropriate ratio was found to be about 0.7 (Fig.1), at which the degree of conversion of isobutene was approximately 20%.
