Kongkiat Suriye
Benzene is commonly produced from various petrochemical processes such as thermal cracking of naphtha. It is used as a feedstock in the wide ranges of petrochemical processes to produce downstream valuable products such as Polystyrene and Phenol. It often contains trace amount of unsaturated hydrocarbon as impurity which can severely cause a deactivation of downstream catalysts. Therefore, unsaturated hydrocarbon must be removed before used as a feedstock in subsequent downstream processes. Standard analytical technique used for measuring trace amount of unsaturated hydrocarbon in benzene feedstock is the Bromine Index (BI) technique. This is an indirect technique used for determining trace amount of unsaturated hydrocarbon that conventional Gas Chromatography (GC) cannot do accurately (too low concentration to quantify).