A study on Removal of Mercaptans from Light Oil Cuts using Cu(II)-A Type Zeolite

In this paper, the removal of mercaptans (known as thiols) from two types of oil cuts, L-SRG and L-naphtha, from Isfahan refinery was studied by using synthesized Cu(II)-A type zeolite in a batch system. The effect of three parameters, ion-exchange copper loading percentage, mass of absorbent per volume of oil cut and time, on the removal of mercaptan (RSH) was investigated at ambient temperature. The numbers of experiments were minimized by using Taguchi method. Four levels making orthogonal array L16 were selected for each parameter. It was observed that the removal of sulfur was extremely influenced by selected parameters.