4. Alternative Refinery Process of Fuel Catalytic Upgrade in Aqueous Media

There are severe disadvantages of using gasoline ether oxygenates (GEOs) in the refineries, in order the final fuels to be in accordance with the current specifications. GEOs disperse swiftly contaminating the environment, as well as being vastly persistent, owning to its high water solubility and volatility, its low biodegradability and its growing scale of use. An alternative fuel upgrade in aqueous media from refinery cuts could completely replace GEOs by producing in situ strong anti-knocking environmental friendly alcohol mixtures. The aforementioned process was successfully implemented by heterogenizing homogeneous catalysts, overcoming the separation difficulties of homogeneous catalysts and taking advantage of their very many benefits that are still kept inevitably apart from the petroleum industry. To that end, homogeneous catalysis is introducing to the downstream petroleum industry efficiently and effectively. The effects of reaction temperature and pressure in biphasic hydrogenation of a hydroformylated refinery cut catalyzed by Ru/P[m-C₆H₄SO₃Na]₃ complex, that was produced in situ by RuCl₃ as catalyst precursor and P[m-C₆H₄SO₃Na]₃ as ligand, were thoroughly examined. Moreover, the Peng-Robinson 78 cubic equation of state, modified by the Twu’s alpha function along with the van der Waals mixing rules, was used in order to model and simulate the chemical engineering process. RuCl₃/TPPTS catalyst proved to be suitable and effective for the proposed novel fuel upgrading process with high conversion of the hydroformylated fuel (98.9%). Taking into account the complication of the substrate composition and the groundbreaking characteristics of this alternative refinery process of fuel catalytic upgrade, the simulation model succeeded for the first time to develop a phase behavior of the fuel and achieved an adequate average absolute relative deviation from the experimental data offering the opportunity for scaling up the chemical process.