Characterization of liquid products from the co-cracking of ternary and quaternary mixture of petroleum vacuum residue, polypropylene, Samla coal and Calotropis Procera

The co-cracking of the petroleum vacuum residue (XVR) with polypropylene (PP), Samla coal (SC) and Calotropis procera (CL) has been carried out in a batch reactor under isothermal conditions at atmospheric pressure. The liquids obtained by co-cracking have been characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, high performance liquid chromatography, 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), 13C NMR, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and inductively coupled argon plasma analyses. It was found that the liquid products obtained from the co-cracking of ternary and quaternary mixtures of the petroleum vacuum residue with polypropylene, coal and C. procera contained less than 1 ppm of Ni and V. The HPLC analyses indicates that the liquids obtained from the cracking of ternary mixture of XVR+PP+CL were mainly aliphatic in nature (saturates content 87.4%). NMR analyses showed that the aromatic carbon contents decreased (15.0%) in the liquid products derived from the co-cracking of quaternary mixtures of XVR+PP+SC+CL compared to their theoretical averages (taking the averages of aromatic carbon contents of the liquids from XVR, PP, SC and CL individually). The overall results indicated that there exists a definite interaction of reactive species when XVR, PP, SC and CL were co-cracked together.