Lube cut cracking by cylindrical dielectric barrier discharge plasma
reactor
M.R.Khani, S.H.Razavi Barzoki , M.S.Yaghmaee , S.I.Hosseini, B.Shokri
Shahid Beheshti University, G.C., Laser and Plasma Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
Keywords: Lube cut, cracking, and plasma technology.
1. Introduction
3. Result and Discussion
Oils have a high carbon and hydrogen content in
long chains form. In oil refinery, different fractions
of oil separate by using fractionating column. The
heavy bottom fractions are often cracked into lighter
to produce more useful products. These methods
need to catalyst and high amount of energy which
increase the production cost. In the present work a
cylindrical dielectric barrier discharge reactor
(DBD) was used and the effect of plasma interaction
with liquid phase feed was investigated [1]. The feed
use is lube cut which contains C5-C43 hydrocarbons.
This feed is a good and close with heavy fractions of
oil which crack in cracking units in oil refinery.
The GC graph shows new peaks appeared on the
base line before lube cut peaks. These peaks show
the production of lighter hydrocarbons. This
experiment shows the ability of plasma technology
to crack heavy oil fractions as a clean and low cost
method without using catalysts.
2. Experimental
As it can be seen in Fig. 1, the experimental setup
consists of a cylindrical DBD reactor, power supply
(0-12 kV and 32 kHz), mass flow controller, cold
trap and diagnostics system that characterize the
electrical properties of the power supply.
Figure 2. GC chromatograms of a) pure lube cut. b) reactor
output in liquid phase.
4. References
Figure 1. Schematic representation of experimental setup used
in this study.
[1] U. Kogelschatz, Plasma Chemistry and Plasma
Processing, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1-46, 2003.