Alkylation Economic data

Table 6.10 lists the typical economic data on the main processes used today for the alkylation of benzene with ethylene. 

In Table IV these same economics are compared against C3 alkylation costs for a given availability of propylene and referenced against a barrel of product from each respective process. The base data is the same as for Table III. 

Propylene demand will grow to the 11-billion lb level by 1973. Propylene from either heavier ethylene feed stocks or European imports will not alleviate the shortage completely. On the other handy it is not expected that price will exceed 3.1 cents/lb. In spite of decreasing propylene availability, refiners will consider release of alkylate stocks at this level. Development of an economic process for direct propylene production is in the future. Dehydrogenation or iodinative partial oxidation processes for propylene from propane are neither commercially proved nor have they been demonstrated to have economic promise. Dehydrogenation in the presence of sulfur may bypass propane dehydrogenation equilibrium limits, and preliminary experimental data are presented. 

Investigations have shown that if one carefully sucked a small amount of surface solution of a surfactant, then one can estimate the magnitude of T. Further, this indicates that when there is 8 mmol/L in the bulk of the solution, at the surface the SDS molecules completely cover the surface. The area per molecule at the surface data (as found to be 50 indicates that the SDS molecules are oriented with the SO" " groups pointing toward water phase, while the alkyl chains are oriented away from the water phase. This means if one used foam bubbles, the collected foam would continuously remove more and more SAS from the surface. This method of bubble foam separation has been used to purify wastewater of SASs (Birdi, 2009 Boyd, 2008). Latter method is especially useful when very minute amounts of SASs (dyes in printing indnstry, pollutants in wastewater) need to be removed. It is economical and free of any chemicals or filters. In fact, if the pollutant is very expensive or poisonous, then this method can have many advantages over the other methods. A simple example is given to understand the useful application of bubbles for wastewater treatment. 

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