Separation Science and Technology, Vol.48, No.7, 1081-1085, 2013
Experimental Study on the Fluorene Removal From Fluorene-Acenaphthene-Dibenzofuran Mixtures of Wash Oil
The azeotrope mixtures in wash oil usually could not use conventional distillation to separate. The objective of this work is to separate and obtain fluorenone from fluorene-acenaphthene-dibenzofuran mixtures which were extracted from wash oil via chemical transformation and azeotropic distillation. We prepared fluorenone-acenaphthene-dibenzofuran mixtures from fluorene-acenaphthene-dibenzofuran mixtures by liquid-phase catalytic oxidation employing air. The effects of catalyst loading, type, and amount of solvent have been investigated. The result showed that fluorene was transformated into fluorenone while other substances were not oxidized. Then we used azeotropic distillation to isolate fluorenone from fluorenone-acenaphthene-dibenzofuran mixtures. And ethylene glycol was found to be the better entrainer than diethylene glycol. The purity and recovery rate of fluorenone was more than 96% and 95%, respectively.