Etherification of gasoline from fluidized catalytic cracking with glycerol

Abstract

This thesis investigates etherification reactions between gasoline from fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) and glycerol both experimental and thermodynamic modeling. FCC gasoline is a potential valuable feedstock of reactive olefins for production of oxygenated ethers. On the contrary, these olefinic compounds should be diminished also in order to meet the new mandatory of gasoline composition which allows the olefin content not to exceed 18 vol% as regulated by Euro 4 standard. The reaction showed a promising process for gasoline quality improvement and utilization of glycerol as a fuel extender simultaneously. The etherified FCC gasoline showed higher research octane number (RON) and lower blending Reid vapor pressure (bRvp) which are preference properties. The suitable operating condition of reaction were carried out by feeding FCC to glycerol ratio of 4:1 with operating temperature of 70 C, 10 g of Amberlyst 16 catalyst and 10 hours of reaction time. The thermodynamic modeling was investigated by using a simulation program, Aspen plus version 11.1. The components of gasoline consist of carbon atom ranging from C4-C7. The group contribution methods (i.e. Joback’s method, Gani’s method and Benson’s method) were applied to estimate the missing parameters (e.g. critical pressure, critical temperature, boiling point, stardard Gibb’s free energy of formation). The preliminary selection of group contribution method shows that Gani’s and Joback’s method are well-predicted for normal boiling point, critical temperature and critical pressure and standard Gibb’s free energy of formation. However, using the group contribution method to estimate conversion give good agreement for only glycerol and C4 olefin while C5-C6 olefins conversion are quite far from the experimental results.