Study On Separating Thiophene From Coking Benzene By Friedel-crafts Acylation Reaction On Solid Acids

China is rich in coal, a great quantity of coking benzene would be obtainedduring the processes of coking coal. Coking benzene is an important industrial rawmaterial which is often used as fine chemical intermediate. Benzene as one of themain component, which is widely used in chemical industry, can be obtained byrefining coking benzene. However, thiophene mixed in the coking benzene(massfraction 0.2%¹.6%)can poison the catalyst and pollute the atmosphere during thereaction. So we have to remove thiophene from coking benzene, if we want to obtainhigher quantity benzene.Some removal methods of thiophene from coking benzene were described in thispaper. Friedel-Crafts acylation reaction is one of them, during which thiophene isconverted into 2-acetyl thiophene which is valuable and widely used onpharmaceutical industry. This method makes it easy to separate benzene andthiophene by the way of widening the boiling point difference of those twocomponents.Solid acids may be promising candidates to replace homogeneous acid catalysts(such as AlCl₃, BF₃, H₂SO₄, etc.) which pose considerable problems such as toxicity,potential danger in handling, disposal problems due to large amount of acidiceffluents, and difficulties in product isolation. In this paper, several solid acids weretested among which Mont-K10 has the highest conversion and selectivity. And then,we tested the life of Mont-K10 catalyst using the Catalytic Evaluation Device. Theresults show that the life and regeneration of Mont-K10 are acceptable.At the end of this paper, the surface acidity of Mont-K10 and Mont-K10-supported ZnClB2B catalysts were characterized by FT-IR technique, and the mechanismof catalytic reaction is analyzed.