SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ROOM TEMPERATURE IONIC LIQUIDS AND ITS APPLICATION TO BENZENE-HEXANE SYSTEM

Abstract

Room temperature ionic liquids owing to their remarkable selectivity towards aromatic hydrocarbons may prove to be potential extractive solvent can be used as an extractive agent to reduce the complexity and high energy cost of existing aromatic hydrocarbon separation processes. The present investigation was undertaken to find out a suitable solvent for the separation of benzene and hexane from a mixture i.e. the separating of the aromatic compound (Benzene) from aliphatic compound (Hexane). For this purpose the synthesis of the room temperature ionic liquid, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium phosphate was carried out in the laboratory and the physico-chemical properties of the synthesized material were determined and compared with the standard values available in the literature. The thermal degradation analysis showed that the compound existed in a liquid state upto a temperature of 250° C .This proves that the synthetic product is a very potential solvent upto 250° C. The solubility of various aromatics were tested in the RTIL the ionic liquid was tested in various solvents and it was found to that benzene and analogous compounds have good solubility. The aliphatic compounds like hexane were found to be immiscible with RTIL. It was desired to measure phase equilibrium data using room temperature ionic liquid as a solvent, with benzene as the aromatic component and hexane as the aliphatic component. To validate this, extraction was carried out with the solvent to feed ratio of 1.5.The extraction studies showed that the benzene fraction goes up drastically in the extract phase as the aromatics content in the feed is increased.