Abstract
Glycol ethyl ether acetate is a new generation of universal solvent, it has strong ability to dissolve, especially for our highly soluble polymers, and it is widely used in paints, coatings, inks and other industries. Currently the world's larger ether acetate's producers are the United States, Germany and Japan, China is still in the research and development stage, which is only limited to low-volume production of chemical reagents, its' products are mainly imported. Therefore, there is a large potential domestic market; it has great significance in the development and improvement of glycol ethyl ether acetate's production technology. Glycol ethyl ether acetate's synthesis methods are: (1) Directly esterification method (the raw material is acetic acid and ethylene glycol ether, the catalyst are sulfuric acid, phosphoric acid and other inorganic acid); (2) Trans esterification (the raw material is ethyl acetate and ethylene glycol ether); (3) Step synthesis (the raw material is ethylene oxide and ethyl acetate).
At present, glycol ethyl ether acetate's production mostly remained in the inorganic acid such as sulfuric acid as the catalyst; it is a backward production technology. In this paper, the study on the catalytic synthesis of glycol ethyl ether acetate with silica loaded cerous sulfate was carried out single factor method and orthogonal experiment method were used to investigate the effects of acid/alchohol ratio, mass fraction of sulfate cerous in the loaded catalyst stand reaction time on the acetic acid conversion, respectively and the optimal technical conditions were determined to be: acid/alchohol ratio1 : 1.0, mass fraction of sulfate cerous in the loaded catalyst 15 % and reaction time 120 min, under which the conversion of acetic acid reached 99.70 %. Compared with the unloaded sulfate cerous, the silica loaded sulfate cerous has some obvious advantages, such as better catalytic activity, less use level of catalyst, higher acetic acid conversion and long life, which is a good catalyst with potential application.
