Understanding selective ring opening of tetralin

• Main Author: Lim, Kok Hwa.
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Research Report
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Chemistry::Organic chemistry::Aliphatic compounds
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42249
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Recent years have seen a shift in the use of crude oil from traditional areas such as industrial or heating needs to transportation and petrochemicals. In particular, diesel has become an increasingly popular transportation fuel. This is because it has higher compression ratio and smaller requirements for air pumping, thus resulting in greater thermal efficiency, fuel efficiency and lower CO2 emission as compared to its gasoline counterpart. On the other hand, refiners are facing increasingly stringent legislations on environment protection. For diesel fuel, many environmental bodies have called for a reduction in sulfur aromatic content, lower product densities and higher cetane numbers. Hence, refiners have great incentives to improve their refining process not only to meet the increasing market demand, stringent environmental and fuel specifications but also because of the declining quality of crude oil that now contains higher sulfur content and high specific gravity.