a review of heterogeneous catalysis esterification

the conventional way to produce esters is the esterification of carboxylic acids with alcohols catalyzed by homogeneous catalysts such as sulphuric acid. these homogeneous catalyst reactions suffer from several drawbacks, such as the difficulties of catalyst separation from the reaction mixture, formation of side reactions and the corrosion of reactors. therefore the attention of many research studies has turned to the replacement of homogeneous catalysts with heterogeneous catalysts. in this paper detailed application of heterogeneous esterification over heteropolyacids (hpas), ion-exchange resins as well as zeolites are described.