Systematic screening of bifunctional ionic liquid for intensifying esterification of methyl heptanoate in the reactive extraction process

For long-chain ester formation, reactive extraction intensified by a bifunctional solvent is a proper process concept as the product ester is usually not soluble in water. To screen a bifunctional ionic liquid (IL), both extraction performance and catalytic activity are considered, taking esterification of methanol and heptanoic acid as example. Based on solute-in-IL infinite dilution activity coefficient generated from DNN-based recommender...