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 m²/g and a pore volume of 0.1938 cm³/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 °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 °C and 0.5 h⁻¹ was 63.54% at atmospheric pressure.