Investigation of sustainable reactive distillation process to produce malonic acid from dimethyl malonate

The new energy battery is currently a hot research topic, leading to an increase in the demand for malonic acid (MA) as a raw material. The objective of the present work is to find a potential reactive distillation (RD) process to solve the problem of low conversion and high energy consumption in hydrolytic system. In the meantime, the RD technology still faces the problem of how to distribute water in the RD column. Aiming at the problem, four different RD processes are proposed: RD combined water separation process (RDWS), RD combined with MA concentration process (RDMC), RD combined methanol separation process (RDMS), and single RD process (SRD). Beforehand, reaction kinetic of dimethyl malonate (DM) hydrolysis was investigated using the ion exchange resin catalysts, and the developed RD model was verified via pilot-scale RD experiments. Finally, the proposed RD process is analyzed from the aspects of economic and environmental and compared with the traditional reaction + distillation (R + D) process. Consequently, the proposed SRD process is a better economy-saving and environment-friendly technology, and has certain directive significance for the industrial production of MA.