Ganguly S., Das G., Kumar G., Kumar S., Sain B., Garg M., 2013, Catalytic Oxidation of Mercaptans in Light Oil Sweetening: Kinetics and Reactor Design, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 32, 661-666.
Design of an oxidizer in Light Oil Sweetening process requires established rate kinetics. With the development of a novel sulphonamide catalyst, the need to establish its rate kinetics was felt necessary. Our earlier studies on mechanistic kinetics established that the rate law was similar to single substrate Michaelis-Menten kinetics. In our present study, batch reactor data was simulated based on total reaction time to predict optimum catalyst dosage and contact time in the oxidizer for industrial scale operations. Feed mercaptide concentration to an oxidizer in the refineries generally falls in the range of 0.05-0.15 molL-1. Thus, kinetic studies were conducted with a feed having mercaptan concentration 0.138 mol L-1 at 15,30 and 45 °C to cover industrial process conditions. The catalyst concentration was varied in the range of 25-200 ppm. Effective activation energy was estimated as 13.97 kJ mol-1 which compared well with 16 kJ mol-1 obtained from our earlier studies and 12 kJ mol-1 reported by Xia et al. (1999) for oxidation of mixed thiols.
