Objective
At the end of the project new, proprietary, pervaporation membranes are available for the selective removal of aromatics from saturates hydrocarbons mixtures. These membranes have been industrially manufactured at GSE (East Germany), since the GFT facilities can't handle the required amount of solvent. This membrane has been characterised in the different partners testing facilities, and no significant discrepancy could be reported on the performances of the membranes.
Due to delay in membrane development it was not possible to test the membranes on the pilot at IFP CEDI SOLAIZE, but some pilot test results were obtained on long term test on a GFT pilot plant, showing a good stability of membrane performances.
Even if the actual membrane separation characteristics are lower that was initially foreseen, some economic hybrid processes schemes have been developed for the reduction of benzene content in gasolines. This new proprietary process schemes afford variable operating costs reductions down to 50 % compared to conventional alternatives. However these results strongly depend on other refinery plant capacity and on the site integration opportunities.
Finally a pilot pervaporation unit has been built jointly by GFT and IFP at Solaize and has been operated successfully on ETOH/ETBE mixtures, providing useful information on the long term behaviour of the membrane developed during Brite project BRE-CT91-0408 and its sensibilities to particular operating parameters such as conditioning procedure, presence of impurities, permeate pressure, temperature, feed flow. No technical difficulties while running need to be reported.
Three modules based on the 1056-1399 GFT industrial membrane with optimised support have clearly demonstrated that EtOH/ETBE separation can be done using this system. Good flux and selectivity were obtained with industrial (i.e. impure) mixtures. Further more this module exhibited a good stability during the ageing tests. As a consequence, the membrane lot No 1056-1399 has been selected for industrial applications.
The separation of aromatics from hydrocarbon mixtures requires, due to the existence of numerous azeotropes, complicated and expensive solvent extraction or distillation processes. The need for improved separation processes of such mixtures (especially for benzene extraction) is increasing in the oil and chemical industries, mainly because of environmental constraints (expected reduction of benzene content in gasoline). The recently developed pervaporation technology might offer attractive solutions for these separations (lower investment costs along with highly reduced energy consumptions and better ease of operation), if needed in combination with conventional techniques. But, unfortunately, present commercially available pervaporation membranes and systems, developed for the dehydration of organic mixtures, cannot perform such separations, although there are at the laboratory scale some promising results with polymers which are selectively permeable to aromatics.
The aim of this project is therefore to develop :
- new pervaporation membranes which are both highly selective and highly permeable to aromatics in hydrocarbons mixtures and also stable in industrial operating conditions,
- efficient pervaporation systems, including low cost spiral-wound modules specially designed for these separations,
- innovative benzene separation schemes combining the membrane units developed in this project with conventional techniques (distillation, extractive distillation, ...).
Among the numerous potential application cases encountered in the oil and chemical industries, 2 cases were identified as the most promising for pervaporation application and will be studied in detail during the project : benzene extraction from light reformate cuts and benzene removal in ethylene production plants. At the end of the project the developed membranes and systems will have been operated on a pilot unit (5 m2 of membrane area) with actual industrial feeds and the technology will then be ready for a final development step on an industrial demonstration unit.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels liquid fuels
- natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry hydrocarbons
- natural sciences chemical sciences polymer sciences
- engineering and technology chemical engineering separation technologies distillation
- natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry aliphatic compounds
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Coordinator
92500 RUEIL-MALMAISON
France
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