Abstract:
Recently, organosulfur removal from liquid petroleum fuels is very significant aspect of environment protecting and fuel cell requests. Therefore, improved approaches to remove sulfur are still essential. In the present work, a simple catalytic oxidative desulfurization (CODS) system for Iraqi gasoil fraction has been successfully developed using CuO-ZnO nanocomposites as catalysts, and H
2O
2 as oxidant under microwave irradiation. The main reaction parameters influencing sulfur conversion including microwave power, irradiation time, catalyst dosage and H
2O
2 to gasoil volume ratio have been investigated. The CuO-ZnO nanocomposites was synthesized with different weight ratios and characterized by XRD, FE-SEM, AFM and BET surface area methods. The results reveal that, high sulfur conversion (93%) has been achieved under suitable conditions of microwave CODS as follows:microwave power of 540 W, irradiation time of 15 min, catalyst dosage of 8 g/L (0.4 g), and H
2O
2:gasoil volume ratio of 0.3. The catalyst reusability shows that the synthesized catalyst can be reused five times without an important loss in its activity.