Publication
Development of a hexane and heptane (commercial grade) purification process with ionic liquids
| Summary: | With increasing market demands when it comes to aliphatic solvents (hexane and heptane) purity, due to their use in polymer, food and pharmaceutical industries, oil refineries have to adapt to these demands in order to remain commercially competitive. The industry standard to remove olefinic and aromatic impurities are hydrogenation processes, yet these processes have high operation costs, high energy, temperature and pressure demands as well as employing heavy metals, thus having heavy costs both monetarily as well as environmentally. There have been other approaches presented by the scientific community to tackle the removal of aromatics and olefins from aliphatics, among them stands the use of ionic liquids as extraction solvents. These liquids are perceived as “green solvents” due to their negligible vapour pressure, have the capacity to solvate both organics and inorganics and being “design solvents”. To adequately select ionic liquids for a given purpose, COSMO-RS, a predictive thermodynamic model, has been widely reported, due to its ability to calculate liquid-liquid equilibrium without relying on binary interaction parameters which are not fully defined for all ionic liquids. Here, COSMO-RS will be employed to qualitatively select the best ionic liquids for the intended separation and statistical modelling will be performed to better understand what constitutes a good ionic liquid. Nonetheless, the use of ionic liquids for aliphatic purification still lacks industrial implementation, due to the high viscosity of the solvents and the fact that transport limitations would lead to unfeasible solvent volumes and separation unit sizes. To tackle this, the use of membrane contactors coupled with ionic liquids has been explored due to their large area of separation for a reduced volume, low solvent to feed rate and independent flow control. In this work the use of a membrane contactor unit is assessed for the possibility of performing the purification of aliphatics with ionic liquids as well as the ability of regenerating the ionic liquids and its scalability. |
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| Main Authors: | Barros, Diogo Miguel Mendes |
| Subject: | Aliphatic solvents Hexane Heptane Ionic liquids Liquid-liquid separation Membrane contactors |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | doctoral thesis |
| Access type: | open access |
| Associated institution: | Universidade de Aveiro |
| Language: | English |
| Origin: | RIA - Repositório Institucional da Universidade de Aveiro |
| Summary: | With increasing market demands when it comes to aliphatic solvents (hexane and heptane) purity, due to their use in polymer, food and pharmaceutical industries, oil refineries have to adapt to these demands in order to remain commercially competitive. The industry standard to remove olefinic and aromatic impurities are hydrogenation processes, yet these processes have high operation costs, high energy, temperature and pressure demands as well as employing heavy metals, thus having heavy costs both monetarily as well as environmentally. There have been other approaches presented by the scientific community to tackle the removal of aromatics and olefins from aliphatics, among them stands the use of ionic liquids as extraction solvents. These liquids are perceived as “green solvents” due to their negligible vapour pressure, have the capacity to solvate both organics and inorganics and being “design solvents”. To adequately select ionic liquids for a given purpose, COSMO-RS, a predictive thermodynamic model, has been widely reported, due to its ability to calculate liquid-liquid equilibrium without relying on binary interaction parameters which are not fully defined for all ionic liquids. Here, COSMO-RS will be employed to qualitatively select the best ionic liquids for the intended separation and statistical modelling will be performed to better understand what constitutes a good ionic liquid. Nonetheless, the use of ionic liquids for aliphatic purification still lacks industrial implementation, due to the high viscosity of the solvents and the fact that transport limitations would lead to unfeasible solvent volumes and separation unit sizes. To tackle this, the use of membrane contactors coupled with ionic liquids has been explored due to their large area of separation for a reduced volume, low solvent to feed rate and independent flow control. In this work the use of a membrane contactor unit is assessed for the possibility of performing the purification of aliphatics with ionic liquids as well as the ability of regenerating the ionic liquids and its scalability. |
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