Separation Of C6-olefin Isomers In Reactive Extractants

α-olefins such as 1-butene, 1-pentene, 1-hexene have been widely used in the production of oxoalcohols, in the synthesis of bromoalkenes, and as the comonomers in the production of polymers such as low-density polyethylene. Besides,α-olefins are the major feed in the industry of plasticizer production and lubricant synthesis. For its similarity in structural and thermodynamic properties, separation of olefin isomers using conventional cryogenic distillation is highly energy- intensive and consequently rather expensive. Consequently , other new separation technology such as extractive distillation, molecular sieve adsorption process, absorption, and membrane separation technique, which has the potential of lowering separation cost, is badly needed to be developed.1-hexene and 3-hexene, because they have similar boiling points, the separation cost on traditional distillation almost accounts for half of the overall investment. A separation process based upon reversible chemical complexation, in which certain metal ions (especially Ag+ and Cu+) reversibly and selectively complex olefin isomers, presents an attractive alternative to traditional distillation. The prior effort using metal ions (usually Ag+ and Cu+) complexing with olefins (π-complexation) mostly focused on the separation of olefins and alkanes. However, there is little work reported on the separation ofα-olefins and other internal olefins. Besides, there is also no report and patent concerning the separation of 1-hexene and 3-hexene.In this paper, several potential reactive extractants were prepared. Using 3M AgNO3-NMP solution as extractant, the selectivity of 1-hexene to 3- hexane was increased to about 2.0, and the selectivity of 1-hexene to 2-hexene reached 1.5. Besides, there are various potential extractant systems that may have effectiveness for the separation of C6-olefin isomers. Using computer simulation, the configuration and chemical or physical properties can be researched, without conducting experiments on every potential extractants, which can save lots of time and money. In this paper, we calculated the Gibbs free energy (△rG) and equilibrium constant (k) in the reaction of silver ions with C6-olefin isomers.