Investigation of the Oligomerization of Light Olefins on Ion Exchange Resin Catalyst

Abstract

The requirements against the quality of motor fuels were rendered more rigorous in the past decade; the most important ones were the major reductions of the sulphur and aromatic content. Besides the changing of the regulation of the motor fuels, the harmful material emission of the Otto- and Diesel-engine built vehicles was also limited significantly. These effects make necessary the greater use of the environmentally friendly, relatively “clean burning”, technically heteroatom- and aromatic free, great n- and i-paraffinic containing blending components in the case of gasoline and diesel gas oils. During our experimental work we studied the possibilities of producing motor fuel blending components like these blending components with the oligomerization of the olefin content of light FCC-naphtha – assuming later industrial application – on Amberlyst-15 acidic ion exchange resin type catalyst. This topic is very important in a modern oil refinery, because different isoparaffin-rich motor fuel blending components can be produced (depending on the catalyst and the process parameters), and this technology can grow considerably the gasoline- and diesel gas oil flexibility of the oil refinery, too. The aim of our experiments was to produce motor fuel blending components with the oligomerization of C4-C6 olefins in light FCC-naphtha matrix. Working on the acidic ion exchange resin catalyst under different process parameters (T: 80–130 °C, P: 15–30 bar, LHSV: 0.5–3.0 h-1) we determined that in the studied process parameter range in preferable case (T: 100–110 °C, P: 25–30 bar, LHSV 0.5–1.0 h-1) the liquid product yield was: greater than 95%, the conversion of olefins: 90–92%, the selectivity of C8-C11: 70–76%, while the selectivity of C12+: 24–30%.