Abstract:

To study on the formation mechanism of organic sulfides, simulated experiments for the reaction between gasoline and magnesium sulfate were carried out to study the effect of water on the formation of organic sulfides in petroleum. The products were analyzed by some advanced analytical methods including gas chromatography, microcoulometry, capillary gas chromatography combined with a pulsed flame photometric detector(GC-PFPD), FT-IR and X-ray diffraction. Moreover, the kinetics of the reactions between gasoline and magnesium sulfate were investigated. It is shown that solid magnesium sulfate could react with gasoline to produce magnesium oxide, hydrogen sulfide, coke, carbon dioxide, and organic sulfides as the main products. With the increase of reaction temperature, the oxidation effect of magnesium sulfate were enhanced, the average molecular mass of hydrocarbon components dropped and the overall trend of inorganic sulfur transformed into organic ones were enhanced in the system. With temperature growing, sulfur was prone to convert to thiophenes with higher thermal stability. According to the kinetic results, the conversion in hydrous system is high than that of anhydrous system. The apparent activation energies for hydrous system and anhydrous system are 68.9 kJ/mol and 78.5 kJ/mol, respectively.

Key words: organic sulfur compounds, gasoline, magnesium sulfate, simulation experiment, water