Inputs

Ethylene is very basic petrochemical compound which is used as intermediate sources

for further production. It is used in wide range of application from chemical industries to
plastic industries. The production of ethylene is a general tendency to provide and develop
innovative production procedures with less environmental impact. As concerns for selection
of feedstocks, the major factor is that control the feed composition with high sensitivity for
each process and produce great quality ethylene with different side products. Also,
technological affects, the availability and yield of feedstock must be taken into account for
input compounds. Related to this fact is that, naphtha is most frequently employed for
ethylene production as seen in Figure1. There is overall demand for naphtha in the world
about more than 20 years and the market trend is enormously higher compared to the other
feedstock and it keep their top rank due to low cost.

Fig 1. Percentage of feedstock for ethylene production [1]

Naphtha is a dangerous liquid which is used in various type of petrochemical process
as a feedstock. It is produced from crude oil by distillation which is approximately %11 of
source in atmospheric condition. However, there are many types of naphtha with different
composition to consider, we focus on the most common forms of naptha. The composition of
naphtha is produced mainly by Iso-alkanes with 39.9 % content and n- alkanes with more than
30 % and 17.7 % grades of napthenes and other aromatics with additional range of carbon
atoms as seen in Table 1.
Table 1. The composition of naphtha [2]

Naphtha has a specific gravity of 0.7 and is characterized as colorless, flammable and
volatile intermediate product for petrochemical based production. When naphtha is used in
manufacturing process, there is a hazard inherent due to high flammability properties. In
general, it has a boiling range between 20 to 200 ˚C. Naphtha is classified as light, heavy and
full range depending on composition, boiling range and density. Light naphtha is composed of
valuable paraffins content and is boiled between 30 – 90 ˚C. Furthermore, heavy naphtha
includes aromatics and napthenes and is highly purified with hydrocarbon in the boiling range
of 30 – 210 ˚C. Another types of naphtha is full range (30- 200 ˚C) which include range
between 4- 12 carbon atoms. It is worth say that full range naphtha is widely used in Europe
and Asia.
The quality is an important aspect for naphtha which is preferably used to determine
the yielding of desired product is sufficient or not. The chemical composition of naphtha
contains about 100 type of hydrocarbons which are mainly olefins, paraffins, alkane and other
aromatics based on the source is obtained with different refinery operations. They are
separated in terms of boiling range, density and composition of hydrocarbons. It is very
beneficial to indicate aromatics content which directly influence the yields of ethylene
production [3].