Aviation fuel production

Urea has the remarkable property of forming crystalline complexes or adducts with straight-chain organic compounds. These crystalline complexes consist of a hoUow channel, formed by the crystallized urea molecules, in which the hydrocarbon is completely occluded. Such compounds are known as clathrates. The type of hydrocarbon occluded, on the basis of its chain length, is determined by the temperature at which the clathrate is formed. This property of urea clathrates is widely used in the petroleum-refining industry for the production of jet aviation fuels (see Aviation and other gas-TURBINE fuels) and for dewaxing of lubricant oils (see also Petroleum, refinery processes). The clathrates are broken down by simply dissolving urea in water or in alcohol. 

Aircraft Fuels. Demand for aviation gas turbine fuels has been growing more rapidly than demand for other petroleum products since 1960, about 3—5% per year compared with 1% for all oil products. This strong demand reflects a current and predicted growth in worldwide air traffic of 4—7% annually until the end of the century. Total world oil demand will be up by 15% by the year 2000, but aviation fuel demand will increase by 50—125%. However, the fraction of the oil barrel devoted to aviation, now about 8%, will increase only slightly. 

Dyroff, G. V., ed. (1993). Aviation Fuels. In Manual on Significance of Tests for Petroleum Products, 6th ed. Philadelphia ASTM. 

Between 1899 and 1919, as demand for gasoline grew, the price increased more than 135 percent, from 10.8 cents/gal to 25.4 cents/gal. From 1929 to 1941, gasoline use by passenger cars increased from 256.7 million barrels to 291.5 million barrels. Consumption of aviation fuel went from only 753,000 barrels in 1929 to over 6.4 million barrels at the start ofWorld War II. By 1941, gasoline accounted for over one-half of petroleum products with 90 percent of gasoline output used as fuel for automotive and aircraft engines. 

At this time, forward-looking companies understood that the ability of a refiner to control the highest octane fuels could corner critical and specialized niche automotive and aviation fuel markets. Refiners looked on catalytic cracking as a way to more finely tune their products for these market segments. 

No unnecessary separations should be made. In a refinery no attempt is made to separate the streams into their individual compounds. Instead, several streams each containing a number of compounds are produced. These are blended together to produce a desirable product. If instead a complete separation of compounds had been made followed by a recombination of them to produce gasoline, fuel oil, aviation fuel, lubricating oils, and so forth, the cost of the end products would be... 

On this basis, petroleum may have some value in the crude state but, when refined, provides fuel gas, petrochemical gas (methane, ethane, propane, and butane), fiansportation fuel (gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel), solvents, lubricants, asphalt, and many other products. In addition to the hydrocarbon constituents, petroleum does contain heteroatomic (nonhydrocarbon) species, but they are in the minority compared to the number of carbon and hydrogen atoms. They do, nevertheless, impose a major influence on the behavior of petroleum and petroleum products as well as on the refining processes (Speight and Ozum, 2002). 

Uses Production of isooctane, butyl rubber, polyisobutene resins, high octane aviation fuels, tert-butyl chloride, ferf-butyl methacrylates copolymer resins with acrylonitrile, butadiene, and other unsaturated hydrocarbons organic synthesis. 

Uses. As thinner for paints and lacquers as component of high-octane aviation fuel in production of styrene in organic synthesis... 

Probably Frey s most important invention involved the use of hydrogen fluoride to convert light olefins, produced as by-products of a catalytic cracker, into high octane motor and aviation fuels. This process is still widely used. It came at a critical time for America s World War II efforts allowing fuel production for the Allied forces. This fuel allowed aircraft faster liftoffs, more power, and higher efficiency. 

Prior to 1938, gasoline was obtained from thermal-cracking plants then the Houdry fixed-bed catalytic cracking process led to the development of a fluidized-bed process by Standard Oil for the catalytic production of motor fuels (4-8). Acid-treated clays of the montmorilIonite type were the first fluid-cracking catalysts widely employed by the industry. However, the ever greater demand for aviation fuels during the 1939-1945 period prompted the search for more active and selective catalysts. Research on novel catalyst... 

LXVIII), a constituent of aviation fuel. The reaction of acetone with acetylene may also lead to developments of importance in finding new uses for acetone. For example, acetone reacts with acetylene in the presence of a metal acetylide catal5rst to form the compound LXIX, which could be converted into isopentane (LXX), another constituent of aviation fuel. There may be possibilities of using the condensation products of acetone such as mesityl oxide (LXXI), which could be converted through the saturated ketone, methyl isobutyl ketone (LXXII), into 4-methylpentane (LXXIII). 

It is likely that future commercialization of Methanol-to-Olefins (MTO) will take place in a fluid-bed reactor for many of the same reasons which encouraged fluid-bed MTG development, including better temperature control and constant product composition. The olefins produced by this process can be readily converted to gasoline, distillate and/or aviation fuels by commercially available technologies such as Mobil s MOGD process. 

In the chemical industry and in research alone more than 1700 trade name products and chemicals are used as solvents (Ash and Ash, 1996). The worldwide solvents market is estimated at over 30 billions pounds per year. Solvents are used in a wide range of industries and applications including metal cleaning and degreasing, dry cleaning operations, automotive and aviation fuel additives, paints, varnishes, lacquers, paint removers, plastics and rubber products, adhesives, textiles, printing inks, pharmaceuticals, and food processing. 

At the outbreak of World War II a synthetic-type cracking catalyst (22) was made available and the quality of the gasoline produced was further improved. The production of this aviation fuel added greatly to the over-all output of finished aviation gasoline (18). Even so, the availability of the components of commercial iso-octanes and alkylates was limiting. 

In the event of another major war, it is probable that all existing isomerization units would be reactivated and pushed to capacity. Although production of Grade 115/145 aviation fuel required by newer aircraft engines may place somewhat greater emphasis on aromatics, there would still be a demand for maximum alkylate production, and butane isomerization would again play an important role. Expansion of pentane and naphtha isomerization is somewhat less certain and would depend on future developments in aircraft fuels. 

Highly strained hydrocarbons such as quadricyclane (structure see below) may serve as high-performance aviation fuels (Hill etal., 1997). It is, therefore, important to know the environmental behavior of such compounds, particularly with respect to spills. In this context, Hill et al. (1997) have studied the hydrolysis of quadricyclane in aqueous solution at pH values between 3 and 4 as well as in soil slurries exhibiting pH values between 4.6 and 6.4. They found that in homogeneous aqueous solution at a given pH, the disappearance of quadricyclane followed pseudo-first-order kinetics, and that two major products (i.e., nortncyclyl alcohol and exo-5-norbomen-2-ol) were formed at a ratio of about 15 ... 

The importance of the isomerization reaction for the production of high-performance fuels was demonstrated during World War II, in the Battle of Britain, when British Spitfires and Hurricanes, using American 100 octane fuel, were able to out-perform German Messerschmidt 109s, that used lower standard and synthetic fuels with an octane rating of only 87.1 Indeed, the first commercial plant to produce aviation fuel was built by... 

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