Extractive Dearomatization of Naphtha Cut using 3-Methyl-N-Butylpyridinium Dicyanimide+Sulfolane Mixed Solvent

The present research has studied the performance of a mixed solvent of sulfolane and 3-methyl-N-butylpyridinium dicyanimide to dearomatize the naphtha fraction of the Tehran oil refinery. Analysis of variance and artificial neural network analysis (as a standard multi-layer perceptron network) reveals that regarding the solvent selectivity, degree of product paraffinicity, and the production yield of dearomatized product, ionic liquid content in the mixed solvent has the highest degree of importance among design variables, whereas, the solvent-to-feed ratio is the most effective one in the solvent capacity response. The findings show the negligible effect of the extraction temperature and the absence of positive and negative synergistic effects between sulfolane and 3-methyl-N-butylpyridinium dicyanimide. Considering the penalty function approach and different single-objective and multi-objective functions, the optimum values of the solvent-to-feed ratio and the ionic liquid content were found as 2.03:1 and 99.47%. As a rough estimate, the mixed solvent leads to a 47% decrease in the required amount of solvent compared to the sulfolane solvent.