Studies on the Extraction of Aromatics from C9⁺ Oil

Abstract

For environmental protection, it is necessary to reduce the aromatic contents in hydrocarbon products. Solvent extraction of aromatics from C9⁺ oil (medium petroleum fraction that contains hydrocarbons with carbon number larger than nine and boils in the range of 440–540 K) was studied in the present work. In this study, n-decane, n-dodecane, n-tetradecane, n-butylbenzene, 1, 4-diisopropylbenzene, and n-octylbenzene were chosen as C9⁺ model compounds oil and sulfolane was used as the aromatic extractant. The binary interaction parameters of UNIQUAC for the multicomponent system at 348.15 K were obtained and applied to batch and continuous multistage extraction simulations. Furthermore the relationship between the ideal stage number and the solvent-to-feed ratio was derived. The concentration of aromatics in C9⁺ oil could be reduced within 2 mol% by using sulfolane as a solvent under the appropriate extraction conditions.