High-purity ethylene carbonate (EC) is widely used as battery electrolyte

polycarbonate monomer

organic intermediate

and so on. An economical and sustainable route to synthesize high-purity ethylene carbonate (EC)

via

the transesterification of dimethyl carbonate (DMC) with ethylene glycol (EG) is provided in this work. However

this reaction is so fast that the reaction kinetics

which is essential for the industrial design

is hard to get by the traditional measuring method. In this work

an easy-to-assemble microreactor was used to precisely determine the reaction kinetics for the fast transesterification of DMC with EG using sodium methoxide as catalyst. The effects of flow rate

microreactor diameter

catalyst concentration

reaction temperature

and reactant molar ratio were investigated. An activity-based pseudo-homogeneous kinetic model

which considered the non-ideal properties of reaction system

was established to describe the transesterification of DMC with EG. Detailed kinetics data were collected in the first 5 min. Using these data

the parameters of the kinetic model were correlated with the maximum average error of 11.19%. Using this kinetic model

the kinetic data at different cataly

st concentrations and reactant molar ratios were predicted with the maximum average error of 13.68%

suggesting its satisfactory prediction performance.