Industrial-scale simulation of proposed process for synthesizing ethyl tert-butyl ether from bioethanol

An industrial scale process is proposed for the synthesis of ethyl bert-butyl ether (abbreviated as ETBE) from bioethanol and tert-butyl alcohol (TBA), and simulated by using ASPEN PLUS, a sequential modular simulation software package. The IB-rich gaseous product from the first reactive distillation column is used to react with pure ethanol (EtOH) in the second reactive distillation column. The overall conversion of tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) and the overall ETBE selectivity are 98.9 and 99.9%, respectively.