Ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) is given growing attentions to as a gasoline oxygenate and an octane enhancer. The synthesis of ether such as ETBE through reactive distillation (RD) offers several advantages of the higher conversion, the improved energy efficiency, the lower capital cost and so on. A dynamic simulation was performed for a RD column with ETBE synthesis. The RD unit has 20 stages and five components. LHHW, UNIFAC, and SRK methods are adopted for the reaction kinetics, the activity coefficient calculation, and the enthalpy (or density) calculation, respectively. The startup policy with total reflux is used. A structured and simple iterative algorithm is devised to estimate the vapor flows with the fast convergence, under the rigorous energy balance. This algorithm is implanted in the conventional Luyben algorithm to simulate the dynamic RD process. The total condenser and the partial condenser (moderately complex model) are considered, and the RD performances for these condensers are observed and compared with each other. In order to determine the optimal process condition, a steady-state simulation by the simultaneous correction with the homotopy continuation was also performed. The simulation tool is MATLAB, and the used computer conditions are Pentium IV 1.4 GHz and 256 MB RAM. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.