Dehydration of reactive industrial mixtures by pervaporation: An innovative approach in acrylic esters processes

•Pervaporation can efficiently dehydrate acrylic acid and ethyl acrylate industrial mixtures.•Pervap#1201 is better performing than the Zeolite-T for acrylic monomers dehydration.•Fick’s modeling fits well with experimental data for the Pervap#1201 membrane.•PVA based membranes are chemically stable after 28days of continuous pervaporation. This work demonstrates for the first time in open literature the dehydration by pervaporation of reactive mixtures encountered in the synthesis of ethyl acrylate. These mixtures contained, together with water and ethanol, highly reactive monomers, i.e., acrylic acid and ethyl acrylate. Among commercially available membranes, the Pervap#1201 of Sulzer Chemtech and the Zeolite-T of Mitsui were identified as promising membranes. As Pervap#1201 clearly performed better, it was selected for detailed pervaporation investigations. The total permeation flux of Pervap#1201 varied from 0.05 to 1.2kgm−2h−1 and the water permeance varied from 360 to 1700 GPU depending on the mass fraction of water in the feed (0.02–0.15) and the operating temperature (65–95°C). Its separation factor (β) toward water was greater than 4000 and the selectivity (α) was greater than 200. Permeate is essentially composed of water (0.99 mass fraction), ethanol (