Abstract
Recently, oil and petrochemical consumptions are grown up rapidly, but petroleum is a nonrenewable energy. So, biomass is an attractive sustainable energy. From literature review, methanol or ethanol can be converted to gasoline range of hydrocarbons via dehydration and other reactions. It was found that SAPO-34 (8-membered ring) produced more than 70 % ethylene and propylene from methanol and ethanol dehydration. H-ZSM-5 (10-membered ring) was also used as a catalyst for methanol to gasoline process by ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company because of its shape selectivity. These two examples show that the products from dehydration are controlled by the pore size of zeolites. Therefore, H-Beta (12-membered ring), which has a larger pore size than H-ZSM-5, was used in this work, and it was expected to produce larger hydrocarbons than gasoline range of hydrocarbons. The effects of acid density and acid strength in the product distribution were investigated using various Si/Al2 ratios of H-Beta zeolites. Gallium oxide was also doped on the H-Beta zeolites by incipient wetness impregnation, since it can enhance single-ring aromatic formation. The catalysts were characterized by using XRD, SAA, and TPD-NH3. Then, the dehydration of bio-ethanol was conducted over 3 g of a catalyst in a U-tube reactor. The reaction was performed for 8 h at 450 °C with the LHSV of bio-ethanol at 0.5 h-1. Then, the products were analyzed by an online GC, GC×GC-TOF/MS, and SIMDIST-GC. As a result, it was found that the highestoil distribution was produced by using moderate modified H-Beta (Si/Al2 ratio = 37), and the oil mainly consisted of C9 aromatics and C + aromatics, which are in a kerosene range of hydrocarbons.
