Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Thermal Cracking
195
Thermal Cracking
Drawbacks
Benefits
The problem with thermal cracking is that the conditions required to perform the process (between 400-900 degrees celsius and 7000kPa) are very difficult and expensive conditions to maintain which can reduce the profits made from the process hence reducing its effectiveness.
There are many benefits of thermal cracking such as:
- It can be carried out on all longer carbon chains.
- Has a very high yield of short chain alkenes (mainly ethene)
By Sophie,
Dan and Alex
Different types of cracking
Thermal Cracking
The process in which heat is used to break the strong C-C bonds in a hydrocarbon to split the long chain into smaller hydrocarbons.
The alkanes are heated under enormous pressure in the absence of air (so that few oxidise) causing the bonds in the molecules to vibrate vigorously. These vibrations cause the bonds to break, splitting the alkanes.
There are two types of cracking:
- Catalytic Cracking
- Thermal Cracking
Both of these types of cracking offer different benefits. Catalytic cracking is carried out at much lower temperatures than thermal cracking and therefore uses much less energy saving money on expensive reaction conditions.
However it also produces a different product to thermal cracking due to the nature of the processes.
Thermal Cracking uses high pressure and temperatures in order to obtain short carbon chains. When long chain alkanes are cracked at high temperatures they favour being cracked at the end of the chain.
Steam Cracker
The most useful oil fractions obtained from fractional distillation tend to be shorter chain length hydrocarbons. Only 16 percent of fractions made from distillation fall into this range (C6 to C10) of useful short change hydrocarbons. Therefore cracking is needed in order to increase the amount of these hydrocarbons created.