Rice husk ash-derived catalyst for diethyl ether production through ethanol dehydration in a large-scale reactor
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Abstract
Ethanol dehydration to diethyl ether (DEE) was carried out in large-scale reactors using rice husk ash (RHA), a low-cost biomass catalyst derived from agricultural waste. This paper investigates the impact of temperature and liquid hourly space velocity (LHSV) to determine the optimal conditions and stability for ethanol dehydration to DEE over an RHA catalyst in a large-scale reactor (2.1 cm i.d., 30 cm length). The RHA catalyst was synthesized using a reflux process with sulfuric acid, followed by calcination at 600 °C, and characterized through X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM), X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), Surface area and pore size analysis, NH₃ temperature-programmed desorption, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The optimal conditions were determined to be 360 °C and an LHSV of 1.3 h⁻¹, which resulted in the highest DEE yield production of 99.21% and ethanol conversion exceeding 99%. The results of the stability tests, conducted over a 24-hour period, demonstrated that RHA is resilient to deactivation and suitable for long-term catalytic applications. These findings indicate the potential of RHA as a promising and sustainable catalyst for the large-scale production of DEE.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright @2021 Engineering Transactions
Faculty of Engineering and Technology
Mahanakorn University of Technology
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