Ethyl Corporation process

This process is currentiy used by Vista Chemical, successor to Continental Oil Company s chemical business, and by Condea. In the Ethyl Corporation process dilute sulfuric acid is used in place of water in the hydrolysis step producing alum rather than alumina. 

Another, highly selective oligomerisation reaction of ethene should be mentioned here, namely the trimerisation of ethene to give 1-hexene. Worldwide it is produced in a 0.5 Mt/y quantity and used as a comonomer for ethene polymerisation. The largest producer is BP with 40 % market share utilizing the Amoco process, formerly the Albemarle (Ethyl Corporation) process. About 25 % is made by Sasol in South Africa where it is distilled from the broad mixture of hydrocarbons obtained via the Fischer-Tropsch process, the conversion of syn-gas to fuel. The third important process has been developed by Phillips. 

Stoichiometric reaction of the type shown by 7.4 also leads to the formation of ethylene oligomers. In the Ethyl Corporation process one step involves stoichiometric reaction of this type. Another variant of this is the Conco process, where such stoichiometric reactions are followed by oxidation and hydrolysis of the aluminum alkyls. This gives linear a-alcohols that are used in biodegradable detergents. The co-product is highly pure alumina, which has a variety of uses, including that of an acidic heterogeneous catalyst. 

The second modification to the original Ziegler Aujbaureaktion, the Ethyl Corporation process, addresses this disadvantage and combines catalytic and stoichiometric ethylene oligomerization in a way that allows more flexibUity with respect to the overall chain length distribution of the products. Figure 6.16.3 shows a scheme... 

The Ziegler process, based on reactions discovered in the 1950s, produces predorninandy linear, primary alcohols having an even number of carbon atoms. The process was commercialized by Continental Oil Company in the United States in 1962, by Condea Petrochemie in West Germany (a joint venture of Continental Oil Company and Deutsche Erdid, A.G.) in 1964, by Ethyl Corporation in the United States in 1965, and by the USSR in 1983. 

Fig. 5. Flow diagram for oxo alcohol manufactured by the two-stage process. Courtesy of the Ethyl Corporation.

In the peaking process of the Ethyl Corporation, the catalytic single-step process and the stoichiometric two-step process are combined. The result is an olefin mixture with a narrowed molecular weight distribution [25]. In this combined process low molecular weight olefins (preferably n-butene-1) obtained by a single-step process are used as displacement olefins (instead of ethylene) in the second step of the stoichiometric two-step Alfen process. Table 7 shows the composition of an olefinic mixture produced by the combination process of the Ethyl Corporation. The values in Table 7 show that the olefin mixtures of the... 

TABLE 7 a-Olefins of the Peaking Process of the Ethyl Corporation ... 

A further narrowing of the molecular weight distribution in the fatty alcohol mixture of the Alfol process was realized in the so-called Epal process of the Ethyl Corporation [38a,44]. In this process the reaction product of the growth reaction is in a first step transalkylated by a C4-C10 olefin mixture ... 

Epal A process for making linear aliphatic alcohols by reacting ethylene with triethyl aluminum and oxidizing the products. Similar to Alfol, but incorporating a trans-alkylation stage that permits a wider range of products to be made. Developed by Ethyl Corporation (now Albermarle Corporation) and operated in the United States since 1964. 

Foster, W. E. Anionic polymerization process. United States Patent 2,841,574 (to Ethyl Corporation) July 1, 1958. 

Frank Howard was also instrumental in the process research for Midgley s tetraethyllead antiknock additive, which led to Exxon s 50% ownership with General Motors of the Ethyl Corporation. Charles A. Kraus, an MIT staff member just before World War I, was its developer, and it appears that Doc Lewis found him for Exxon. Another Lewis idea later resulted in Exxon s fluidized bed iron ore process, commercialized after World War II only in Venezuela by the Arthur F. McKee Company. Someday, such a process might be incorporated in integrated steel minimills. 

Industrially, the process is usually conducted in two steps, growth followed by displacement, but it can be carried out in a single step around 200 at 25.10 Pa pressure in the presence of much smaller amounts of triethytalummum (0.5 per cent weight). In this case, it is unnecessary to recover the alkylaluminum, and it can be hydrolysed with the formation of alumina. Ethyl Corporation in the United States uses the two-step process, while Oulf Oil in the United States and Mitsubishi Chemiad in Japan use the one-step process. 

Production Processes of Polydichlorophosphazene The basic product of all various commercial polyphosphazenes is polydichlorophosphazene. Two companies, Ethyl Corporation and Elf Aquitaine (Atochem) had pilot plants to produce the chloropolymer. 

The Ethyl Corporation developed a process based on a combination of stoichiometric and catalytic chain-growth reactions. Unifying these two parts with a transalkylation step allows very efficient control of the a-olefin chain length, in order to meet the market needs [3, 20]. A typical flow diagram of the process is given in Figure 1. 

Aside from experimental and developing processes, there are three competing commercial processes for further refining metallurgical silicon into semiconductor grade polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon) Siemens, Union Carbide Chemicals, and Ethyl Corporation methods. This industry exists primarily to support the electronics industry. 

The third commercial process for production of polysilicon was developed by the Ethyl Corporation. In this case, the raw material is not MG silicon but silicon fluoride, a waste product from fertilizer manufacture, which is reacted with lithium aluminum hydride or sodium aluminum hydride, with saleable byproduct of lithium aluminum fluoride or sodium aluminum fluoride,... 

Two processes have been commerdalized on the basis of the oligomerization of ethylene, one by Conoco Chemical and the second by Ethyl Corporation. They differ in the distribution curve of the different alcohols formed. Whereas Conoco s Alfol alcohols range from C2 to C22 with about 55 per cent C12 or above (Fig. 9.S), the alcohol distribution of the Ethyl process is narrower and comprises 85 par cent C 2 - Tins change in the distribution curve results from the insertion of an additional stage of transalkylation by triisobutyUluminum. 

General Atomic (GA) Technologies have developed another process termed a preceramic polymer coating (PPC) using a polymeric coating system made by Ethyl Corporation, which has been shown to perform as well as, or better than, the industry standard CVD-SiC system. 

Ziegler Alcohol Processes. Two processes for the production of synthetic fatty alcohols are based on the work of Ziegler on organic aluminum compounds the Alfol process, developed by Conoco and Ethyl Corporation s Epal process. Fatty alcohols synthesized by these processes are structurally similar to natural fatty alcohols and are thus ideal substitutes for natural products. 

As most chemistry students know rather little about industrial processes, the relevance of organometallic chemistry to industry has been indicated and the scale of manufacture of some of the major industrial organo-metallics (lead antiknocks, silicones, and aluminium alkyls) has been emphasized. Thanks are due to the Continental Oil Company, Ethyl Corporation, and Imperial Chemical Industries for providing information in this connection. 

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