Separation of C6-Olefin Isomers in Reactive Extractants

Chemical complexation, in which certain metal ions (especially Ag+ and Cu+) reversibly and selectively complex olefin isomers, was used to separate 1-hexene from a mixture of internal hexenes as an attractive alternative to traditional distillation. Several potential reactive extractants were investigated for their selectivity of both 1-hexene to 2-hexene and 1-hexene to 3-hexene. With 3 mol/L AgNO3-N-methyl-pyrrolidone (NMP) solution as extractant, the selectivity of 1-hexene to 3-hexane was increased to about 2.0 and the selectivity of 1-hexene to 2-hexene reached 1.5. Both the raffinate phase and the extracted phase were analyzed using a gas chromatograph equipped with a flame ionization detector and a 50-m capillary column. The experimental results show that the silver nitrate NMP solution has the better selectivity than other reactive extractions.