A suitable catalyst for the application in reactive distillation has to satisfy different criteria, such as fast reaction kinetics in the expected temperature range and being commercially available and low priced. The experimental results for the homogenous catalyst sulphuric acid and the heterogeneous catalyst Amberlyst® 15 are presented in the following. The experiments are performed at a temperature of 347 K according to the experimental procedure described in Section 3. Different mass fractions of the homogenous (ωcat = 0.015 gcatalyst goleic acid −1 ) and the heterogeneous catalyst (ωcat = 0.285 gcatalyst goleic acid −1 ) are added to the reaction mixture, since preliminary experiments revealed a big difference in the activity of the homogenous and the heterogeneous catalyst. Furthermore, the molar ratio of ethanol to oleic acid was increased in the heterogeneously catalysed experiments to enhance the reaction rate. Fig. 2 shows that for the homogenous catalyst sulphuric acid a fast reaction rate is observed and the equilibrium conversion is reached after less than 120 min reaction time for the applied reaction conditions. The heterogeneous catalyst Amberlyst® 15 also shows a catalytic activity for the investigated esterification reaction. Nevertheless, the reaction rate is significantly lower compared to the homogeneously catalysed esterification. Thus, sulphuric acid is identified as suitable catalyst for the application in a reactive distillation column to achieve considerably high conversion in the respective residence time.