Synthesis of Ethanol by Hydration of Ethylene

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Consider the following gas-phase reaction to produce ethanol from ethylene: . Take the initial number of moles of ethylene to equal 1. The initial number of moles of water is determined by the selected steam-to-ethylene molar ratio. Initially, there is no ethanol in the reaction vessel. This Demonstration plots the extent of reaction versus pressure,
, for user-set values of the temperature,
. It follows from the stoichiometry of the reaction that the extent of the reaction is equal to the fractional conversion of ethylene at equilibrium.
Contributed by: Housam Binous, Nadhir A. Al-Baghli, and Brian G. Higgins (January 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
The equilibrium constant is equal to , where
is the fugacity coefficient of species
in solution,
,
, and
.
Reference
[1] J. M. Smith, H. C. Van Ness, and M. M. Abbott, Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, 7th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.
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