Reactive distillation of tertiary olefin etherification for the purification of C8 α-olefin from F-T synthetic products

Utilization of F-T synthetic to produce value-added C8 linear α-olefin is a promising alternative approach, however, the purification of α-olefin from F-T synthetic products is a great challenge, especially for removing 2-methyl-1-heptene (MH). This article addresses the novel method of etherification reaction to remove MH from F-T synthetic products, and develop by far the most efficiency reactive distillation (RD) method to intensified the etherification process. The scarcity of thermodynamic data was measured and regressed by the activity coefficient models, furthermore, kinetics of the etherification reaction of MH with methanol was explored using an ion exchange resin as catalyst, and then fitted by a pseudo-homogeneous model. The pilot-scale RD experimental results show that the conversion of MH reaches 91.83 % and the purity of α-olefin increases by 14.9 wt% (percentage points). Process analysis method was used to realize the optimization of design and operating parameters of etherification RD column based on the developed rigorous model. The optimization results show that the conversion of MH achieves 99.74 % and the purity of α-olefin achieves 96.87 wt%, which is also illustrated that the novel method for removing MH is proposed paving the way for purification of α-olefin from F-T synthetic products.