Glacial acetic acid production

During the Renaissance, people prepared glacial acetic acid by dry distillation of metal acetate. In the 16th century, the German alchemist Andreas Libafeus compared the glacial acetic acid produced by this method with the acid extracted from vinegar. Because of the presence of water, the nature of acetic acid has changed so much that, for centuries, chemists thought it was two very different substances. Until the French chemist Pierre Adet proved that the main components of the two substances are the same.

In 1847, German scientist Adolf William Hermann Kolbe synthesized acetic acid for the first time from inorganic raw materials. The reaction process is as follows: first, carbon disulfide is converted to carbon tetrachloride through chlorination, followed by hydrolysis and chlorination of pyrolysis of tetrachloroethylene, thereby producing trichloroacetic acid, and finally, acetic acid is produced by electrolytic reduction.

In 1910, most of the glacial acetic acid was extracted from coal tar obtained from retorting wood. The process is to first treat coal tar with calcium hydroxide, and then acidify the formed calcium acetate with sulfuric acid to obtain acetic acid. In 1911, the world's first industrial plant for the oxidation of acetaldehyde to acetic acid was built in Germany, and then a method for the production of acetic acid by the oxidation of low-carbon alkanes was developed.