Construction of Fixed Bed Reactor and Catalytic Performance of the PS-ILs Enabled by Immobilized Ionic Liquids for Esterification

Polystyrene (PS) microspheres, prepared by suspension polymerization, were applied to synthesize chloromethylated polystyrene microspheres (PS-CH₂Cl) by chloromethylation. PS-CH₂Cl was then used for the immobilization of acidic ionic liquid to prepare immobilized ionic liquid polystyrene microspheres (PS-ILs) as catalyst, thus avoiding the difficulty of ionic liquid separation. The structure of PS-ILs was characterized by SEM and FT-IR. PS-ILs was loaded in a fixed-bed reactor to catalyze the esterification of acetic acid and n-butanol. The experimental results indicated that the catalyst had good catalytic performance. The conversion rate of acetic acid was about 81.58% after 4 h reaction in the fixed-bed reactor.