A kinetic approach to the esterification of maleic anhydride with methanol on H-Y zeolite

The purpose of this work is to study the kinetics of the esterification of maleic anhydride with methanol to form dimethyl maleate in a batch reactor in the presence of H-Y zeolite as a catalyst. This is a series-parallel type multiple reaction where, the first reaction involves the formation of monomethyl maleate that further reacts with alcohol to form dimethyl maleate. Dimethyl maleate was found to be the only product in the reaction mixture. Temperature, speed of agitation, catalyst size, reactant mole ratio and catalyst loading have pronounced effect on the rate of the reaction. A homogeneous rate model and heterogeneous rate models have been derived and fitted with the experimental data. The activation energy was found to be 44.65 kJ/mol.