Alkylation Of Isobutane With Butene Using Sulfuric Acid As Catalyst

As an environmentally friendly clean fuel, alkylation gasoline has many advantages, such as high octane number, anti-sensitivity, low vapor pressure, high fuel value, and clean-burning. The main technology of alkylation gasoline production is the alkylation of C4 hydrocarbon using sulfuric acid as catalyst. This thesis investigated the alkylation of isobutane with isobutene using sulfuric acid as the catalyst. Firstly, by thermodynamic calculation, the equilibrium constant of main reaction of alkylation was obtained to be 1.92×108, and the reaction heat was -69.9 kJ/mol. Next, combined with characteristics of alkylation reaction and material property, a setup with batch reactor was established, which can deal with fast mixing, temperature controlling, and accurate charge-in. Using GC-MS technology, the methods of analytical procedure and octane number calculation for alkylation gasoline were established, and the analytical procedure has good precision. After eliminating the effect of mass transfer, the influences on alkylation reaction were investigated, such as the ratio of acid to hydrocarbon range from 1:1 to 2:1, the ratio of isobutane to isobutene ranging from 15:1 to 100:1, and the temperature ranging from 3 to 12℃. Finally, on the basis of carbocation-chain reaction mechanism, the kinetic model of alkylation of isobutane with isobutene with six parameters was established. The fitting results show that there was a good agreement between model calculation and experimental data, and the activity energy and pre-factor were obtained to be 86.85 kJ/mol and 2.11×1016min-1 respectively.