Characterization of commercial ceramic adsorbents and its application on naphthenic acids removal of petroleum distillates

Abstract

The mixture of carboxylic acids present in petroleum oil and directly responsible for its acidity and corrosiveness in liquid phase during the refine process is denominated "naphthenic acids". These acids are also present in distilled fraction of petroleum, causing several problems in final products quality. A possible way to remove the carboxilic acids from petroleum distilled fractions is the adsorption in porous materials. However, the results obtained until now indicate that ion exchange resins would be the best adsorbents for this process, which would probably increase its cost. In this work, two commercial adsorbents (clay and activated alumina) were characterized by a set of physical-chemistry techniques and evaluated concerning their capacity of removing naphthenic acids from a light petroleum fraction. It was verified the influence of a thermal treatment previous to the adsorption in its physical-chemistry characteristics and its properties. A high reduction of the TAN values was verified in the residual oils from both adsorbent, although there was a competition among all the compounds present in the light oil fraction for the adsorption sites, which can be probably related to the thermal pre-treatment. These results were related to corrosion yield experiments, and it was observed that the adsorbent pretreatment also affected the reduction in corrosion yields for both alumina and clay.

Keywords

• adsorption
• petroleum derivatives
• clay
• alumina