As a special distillation process, reactive distillation technology has been widely used in the petrochemical field due to its outstanding advantages such as high efficiency and energy saving. It has been paid more and more attention from researchers in the field of chemical process enhancement since the 1920s. With the progress of social development level, resource conservation and environmental friendliness have become the general trend. In order to pursue the maximization of energy utilization and higher economic benefits, scientific researchers have developed a variety of new reactive distillation processes suitable for various occasions considering the advantages and limitations of traditional reactive distillation technology. The biggest difference from traditional reactive distillation is that the new processes have the characteristics of saving equipment investment, low reaction energy consumption, improving mass transfer, heat transfer efficiency and energy utilization rate. In order to fully understand and apply the technology, this paper describes the process flow of traditional and new reactive distillation technologies in detail, and focuses on analyzing and summarizing the latest developments in the industrial application of reactive distillation technologies in various fields. Finally, it points out that reactive distillation technologies issues that need attention and future development directions.