Adsorption of organic chloride compounds from naphtha fraction of contaminated crude oil by sintered γ-Al2O3 nanoparticles at constant temperature of 303 K: Equilibrium, kinetic and thermodynamic

Due to destructive effects of organic chlorides, removal of these compounds from contaminated crude oil and its distillates is very crucial for oil refiners. Despite the importance of this subject, a few researches in this area exist and most of them proposed solutions that are very difficult and costly. Therefore, in this study it is going to introduce sintered alumina nanoparticles as a new suitable adsorbent of organic chlorides from naphtha fraction of contaminated crude oil. The adsorbents were made via sintering 10 to 35 grams of γ-Al2O3 nanoparticles with average particle size of 20 nm at temperature of 773.15 K for about 4 hours and then, were characterized by XRD, SEM-EDS, and BET analyses. The removal efficiency of the adsorbent at adsorption time of 10 hours reached to more than 60% and 96% for samples with initial concentrations of 105 and 8.5 mg/L respectively. According to equilibrium investigations, Freundlich isotherm model provided a better fit to the adsorption equilibrium data than other isotherm models. It was also found that for samples with high organic chloride concentrations, the adsorption kinetics followed the pseudo-first-order kinetic equation well while pseudo-second-order kinetic model exhibited better fit to kinetic data of samples with low organic chloride concentration. Above mentioned investigation results implied that the sintered γ-Al2O3 nanoparticles would be an effective adsorbent for adsorption removal of organic chloride from naphtha distillate of crude oil.