Biodegradable choline-like deep eutectic solvents for extractive desulfurization of fuel

Publication date: Available online 21 February 2017 Source:Chemical Engineering and Processing: Process Intensification Author(s): Wei Jiang, Lei Dong, Wei Liu, Tao Guo, Hongping Li, Sheng Yin, Wenshuai Zhu, Huaming Li Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have been deemed as green solvents due to their similar physical properties to ionic liquids. The most advantage of DESs, especially choline chloride-based DESs, is that they are biodegradable and non-toxic. In this work, several choline-like DESs are synthetized and characterized by 1H NMR, FTIR, UV-vis, Raman and ESI-MS. The DESs with different straight alkyl chains linked to N atom were studied. It is found that [C12DMEA]Cl/FeCl3 shows the best performance and 52.9% of desulfurization efficiency is obtained. For comparison, two kind of phenyl substituted DESs, [BzMDEA]Cl/FeCl3 and [BzMDEA]Cl/FeCl3, are employed to investigated the extractive mechanism. The result shows that CH-π interaction may be much stronger than π-π interaction in this reseasch. The DESs can be regenerated by water and the extractive efficiency is almost not declined. Graphical abstract

Source: Chemical Engineering and Processing: Process Intensification - February 20, 2017 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research