Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Petroleum and Coal, cilt.63, sa.3, ss.916-923, 2021 (Scopus)
© 2021, Petroleum and Coal. All rights reserved.It is known that Europe lacks automotive diesel fuel. Cracked gas oils from catalytic cracking processes, like light cycle oil (LCO), have very poor ignition quality characteristics and are not proper for use as automotive diesel fuel. The upgrade of LCO by solvent extraction, a method known in the refining industry is under investigation. Preliminary outcomes have shown that the raffinate of LCO extraction with acetonitrile as solvent has better properties compared to the initial LCO. In this study, a series of experiments of solvent extraction was performed in an LCO sample that was provided by a refining company in Greece. Acetonitrile was used as an extraction solvent since it has a significantly lower boiling point from the LCO boiling range, therefore it is easy to recover the solvent by distillation. The extraction was studied at various solvent/oil ratios and as a multi-stage process, where the raffinate of the extraction step was fed on the next extraction stage. Mass yield on the extraction products was measured in order to evaluate the efficiency of acetonitrile for the extraction of LCO. Apart from that, key properties of the LCO, raffinate fractions and extract fractions were measured in an attempt to evaluate if the extraction products have properties that can make part of the diesel fuel pool. Some of the properties that were measured include density, viscosity, sulfur content, aromatic hydrocarbons content, and cetane number.