Abstract

Reactive distillation is being increasingly viewed as a highly promising alternative in the improvement of processes, exploiting the positive synergistic effects of integrating reaction and separation. Today, the technology has widened the scope of application beyond exothermic reactions and equilibrium limited reactions. This has led to intensive research about applications, synthesis/ design of operation and design of column devices of reactive distillation in academia as well as in industry. This article focuses specifically on reviewing and discussing patents for the application of heterogeneous catalytic distillation systems.

Keywords: Catalytic column devices, catalytic distillation, heterogeneous catalysts, process intensification, reactive distillation.