Intensification of esterification reaction microbubble mediated reactive distillation

The current study is based on the microbubble mediated reactive distillation by converting conventional homogeneous liquid-liquid system into a heterogeneous vapour-liquid system. Microbubbles owing to their higher surface area to volume ratio provides better mass transfer as well increasing the conversion and rate of reaction. To prove the hypothesis, production of methyl acetate was investigated because of its industrial importance. The experimental plan was designed using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). It allowed analysing the effects of operational parameters simultaneously. The kinetics investigation demonstrated that the esterification reaction occurs, indeed, on the vapour liquid interface at the skin/surface of the bubble and follows pseudo-first order kinetics. The maximum conversion of the process was found to be 91% in 20 min which is significantly higher than any previous study. Furthermore, RSM and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) were employed to develop models to analyse the correlations among parameters and to predict the responses. The GRU produced higher R2 = 0.9981 as compared to R2 = 0.9715 produced by RSM. The results depict that GRU model is more robust and reliable than Response Surface Methodology for parameter interaction study and response prediction.