Reactive distillation of tertiary olefin etherification for the purification of C8 α-olefin from F-T synthetic products

•Removal of tertiary olefins using etherification method to purify a-olefins.•Enhancing the process of etherification process by reactive distillation (RD)•Successful validation of etherification RD process using the pilot-scale experiment.•Optimization of the operating conditions of the RD column using rigorous modeling.•The purity of a-olefins reaches 96.46 wt% using etherification RD process.