Abstract: In this paper, dimethyl fumarate was synthesized by isomerization and esterificatoin of maleic anhydride and methanol under 1-methyl-3-alkyl-imdazolium/AlCl3catalysts. The process of one step method was developed and optimized. The reaction temperature, amount of the catalyst, reaction time, material molar ratio and reaction time were optimized by the method
of sequential discriminate procedure for design of experiments.
Experimental results have indicated that 1-methyl-3-alkyl-imdazolium/AlCl3can catalyze the isomerization of maleic anhydride and esterification of fumaric acid, and the optimum conditions are: the molar ratio of catalyst to maleic anhydride is 0.17,that of methanol to maleic anhydride 4.01, the reaction temperature 93.0℃,the reaction time 5.0 hours, and the yield of dimethyl fumarate can reach 90%.

Key words: 1-methyl-3-alkyl-imdazolium/AlCl3, dimethyl fumarate, isomerizate, esterificatoin, synthesize