Hydroisomerization of n-hexane over Pt/TiO2 catalysts

One of the most important processes to obtain gasoline with high octane numbers is isomerization. In this paper, Pt/TiO2 was prepared successfully by using the sol-gel method by hydrolysis of titanium tetraisopropoxide as a titania source with ethanol and then platinum was loaded on the synthesized catalyst; the result shows that the sample prepared has a good crystallinity with a surface area of about 85 m(2)/g and a pore volume of 0.1938 cm(3)/g, while XRD shows that the prepared sample was anatase phase. The effect of both temperature and liquid hourly space velocity of the prepared catalyst was achieved by hydroisomerization of n-hexane in a fixed bed reactor with a temperature of 200-275 degrees C and LHSV 0.5-2h(-1). The results show that the conversion of n-hexane was increased with increasing temperature and decreasing LHSV; the maximum conversion achieved at temperature 275 degrees C and 0.5 h(-1) was 63.54% at atmospheric pressure.