• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.116-120
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• 2014

Light cycle oil (LCO), one of the by-products of the catalytic cracking gasoline manufacturing process, contains a lot of valuable aromatics. In particular, 2,6-dimethylnaphthalene (2,6-DMN) contained in LCO has been becoming important as the basic material of polyethylene naphthalate plastic and liquid crystal polymer, etc. If it were possible to separate and purify the valuable aromatic hydrocarbons (such as 2,6-DMN) from LCO, which have only been used as fuel mixed with heavy oil, it would be very meaningful in terms of the efficient use of resources. We investigated the high-purity purification of 2,6-DMN by the combined method of melt crystallization (MC) and solute crystallization (SC). The enriched DMN isomer mixtures (concentration of 2,6-DMN : 10.43%) recovered from LCO by distillation-extraction combination and the crystal recovered by MC used as raw materials of MC and SC, respectively. The solvent of SC used was a mixture of methanol and acetone (60 : 40 wt%). The crystal of 2,6-DMN with a high-purity of 99.5% was recovered by MC-SC combination. We confirmed that the MC-SC combination was one of the very useful combinations for the high-purity purification of 2,6-DMN contained in the enriched DMN isomer mixtures.