Chemistry of alkylaromatics in crude oil upgrading

Due to the rise in demand of crude oil over the long term, technologies to upgrade crude oil need to be developed to ensure maximum use efficiency of future oil sources. In typical carbon rejection processes, coke formation is a common phenomenon that would lead to decreased yield of upgraded oil. As a result, the chemical behavior of coke formation is a potent area of research. Due to the high complexity of the composition of crude oil and coke, this work simplifies the study of supercritical water upgrading of crude oil to a hexylbenzene pyrolysis system. The pyrolysis of hexylbenzene at process conditions of 450°C and 75 creates several hundred products resolved by GCxGC, and the analysis is intractable if one considers only the experimental data, which does not reveal reactive intermediates or reaction paths.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Lai, Lawrence Tin Chi.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William H. Green.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122850

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122850