Isomerization of paraffin mixtures produced from sunflower oil

Abstract

The importance of biofuels becomes more acute, especially in the European Union. Beside them, the bio gas oil is a promising product that is a fuel with high isoparaffin content in the gas oil boiling range, which can be produced by the catalytic hydrogenation of different triglycerides. In this paper the isomerization of different intermediate products obtained over different hydrogenation catalysts and having high n-paraffin content was studied on SAPO-11 catalyst at 300–380 °C temperature, 20–80 bar pressure, 0.5–3.0 h-1 of liquid space velocity and 400 Nm3/m3 of H2/feed ratio. It was found that the oxygen containing intermediate products significantly changed the degree ofisomerization, but the hydrocarbon composition and the aromatic content of the n-paraffin mixtures had no noticeable effect on the conversion. During the experiments excellent quality diesel gas oil blending components were produced with high i-paraffin content and they were practically free of heteroatom content.