New TDAE plant with EDL license

EDL Anla­gen­bau Gesellschaft mbH (EDL), the tech­nol­o­gy and engi­neer­ing provider based in Leipzig, Ger­many, sold a license for its two-stage extrac­tion tech­nol­o­gy to the Mid­dle East in the 4^th quar­ter of 2018. With this tech­nol­o­gy process oils are pro­duced in an effi­cient and eco-friend­ly way. These oils play, for exam­ple, an impor­tant role as high-qual­i­ty ten­der oils for the pro­duc­tion of auto­mo­bile tires.

The new sol­vent extrac­tion plant for the pro­duc­tion of eco-friend­ly, high-qual­i­ty process oils (TDAE, Treat­ed Dis­til­late Aro­mat­ic Extract) based on the EDL license allows cus­tomers to meet the lat­est envi­ron­men­tal and qual­i­ty require­ments and to expand their prod­uct port­fo­lio. The new sol­vent extrac­tion plant will be designed under con­sid­er­a­tion of new resource-sav­ing technologies.

As part of the licens­ing, EDL car­ries out the required lab­o­ra­to­ry tests and pre­pares the PDP (Process Design Pack­age) for the plant and the FEED (Front End Engi­neer­ing Design) for the extrac­tor section.

EDL Test Facilities

The required process para­me­ters and the opti­mum process con­di­tions are deter­mined in EDL’s own test facil­i­ties based on cus­tomer and prod­uct require­ments as well as the hydraulic data of extrac­tor inter­nals. This allows a safe design of the plant for the entire range of feed­stock avail­able at the customer.

High-quality products in two extraction steps

The basic prin­ci­ple of EDL’s tech­nol­o­gy to obtain high-qual­i­ty base and process oils from vac­u­um dis­til­lates (lube cuts) and dea­s­phalt­ed oil (DAO) is a two-stage extrac­tion process.

As a first step of extrac­tion the aro­mat­ic com­pounds are removed as so called DAE (Dis­til­late Aro­mat­ic Extract) or RAE (Resid­ual Aro­mat­ic Extract). NMP (or fur­fur­al) is used as sol­vent. At the same time aro­mat­ic-rich oils are obtained that can be used to pro­duce high-qual­i­ty base oils.

In a sec­ond extrac­tion stage using a pro­pri­etary sol­vent mix­ture, DAE and RAE are trans­formed into high-qual­i­ty process oils such as Treat­ed Dis­til­late Aro­mat­ic Extract (TDAE) and Treat­ed Resid­ual Aro­mat­ic Extract (TRAE) hav­ing a low lev­el of poly­cyclic aro­mat­ic hydro­car­bons (PCA).

Eco-friendly atoxic process oils for the tire industry

DAE and RAE are required as ten­der oils to pro­duce rub­ber prod­ucts, such as tires, hoses, belts, cable insu­la­tion, floor cov­er­ings and shoe soles. Due to the high per­cent­age of PCA being car­cino­genic, muta­genic and repro­tox­ic DAE and RAE are no longer used today. With fur­ther pro­cess­ing of DAE and TAE to TDAE and TRAE resp. in the sec­ond extrac­tion stage the lim­it val­ue for PCA clear­ly falls below 3 per­cent by mass as required by Euro­pean Direc­tive 2005/69/EC with­out impair­ing the excel­lent prop­er­ties as ten­der oil. Thus, a deci­sive con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­tec­tion of human beings and the envi­ron­ment is made.

In addi­tion to sol­vent extrac­tion EDL also grants licens­es for oth­er tech­nolo­gies to pro­duce base oils, process oils, wax­es and oth­er high-qual­i­ty spe­cial­ty prod­ucts, such as Dewax­ing / Deoil­ing, Microniza­tion, Aromex or the sol­vent dea­s­phalt­ing process SDA Plus.