CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 45, 2015 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Petar Sabev Varbanov, Jiří Jaromír Klemeš, Sharifah Rafidah Wan Alwi, Jun Yow Yong, Xia Liu Copyright © 2015, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l., ISBN 978-88-95608-36-5; ISSN 2283-9216 DOI: 10.3303/CET1545178 Please cite this article as: Baizhumanova T.S., Tungatarova S.A., Zheksenbaeva Z.T., Kassymkan K., Zhumabek M., 2015, Synthesis of oxygenates by oxidation of light alkanes on modified catalysts, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 45, 1063- 1068 DOI:10.3303/CET1545178 1063 Synthesis of Oxygenates by Oxidation of Light Alkanes on Modified Catalysts Tolkyn S. Baizhumanova, Svetlana A. Tungatarova*, Zauresh T. Zheksenbaeva, Kaisar Kassymkan, Manapkhan Zhumabek D.V. Sokolsky Institute of Organic Catalysis and Electrochemistry, 142, Kunaev str., Almaty, 050010, Republic of Kazakhstan tungatarova58@mail.ru Supported polyoxide catalysts on the base of Mo and W, as well as natural Kazakhstan’s clays were tested in the process of oxidative conversion of propane and propane-butane mixture. The influence of reaction temperature, contact time, composition and percentage of the active component of catalyst were determined. The important petrochemical products - acetone (500 - 550 ° С) and acetaldehyde (300 - 350 ° С) were the main liquid products of reaction on natural Kazakhstan's clays and also on clays modified by Mo, Bi, Cr, Ga ions. 1. Introduction Partial oxidation of liquefied oil gas into ketones and aldehydes is important both in ecology and economy because 10 billion m 3 of casing-head gas is burned every year in the world and harmful exhaust into atmosphere measured by thousands of tons. Combustion process by means of huge consumption of oxygen and heat emission promotes strengthening of hotbed effect. The cost of 1000 m 3 of oil gas is about $30. Thus economy lost the great sum heating sky. More expensive product than raw substances is possible obtain from oil gas, for example, from isobutane (Wang et al., 2010), C2-C5 alkanes (Arutyunov et al., 2014) or methane (Palma et al., 2015). The rapid development of the petrochemical industry in the last decade has raised acute problems of the optimal choice of feedstock and catalysts for relevant processes. According to forecasts for the near future, saturated C1-C4 hydrocarbons not only will retain but also will strengthen their position as a raw material for the production of unsaturated hydrocarbons. Therefore, the problem of searching for ways of their effective conversion into different oxygen-containing compounds is also urgent. Unlike methane and ethane, which yield less complex compounds, propane and butane are expected to give unsaturated hydrocarbons, aldehydes, acids, and alcohols butane upon incomplete oxidation. Only the optimal choice of catalysts can ensure targeted synthesis with the predominant formation of a desired compound selected from these products. Heterogeneous catalysts that are examined in light alkanes oxidation reactions are represented by both individual on the base of vanadyl phosphate (Casaletto et al., 2010), titanium pyrophosphate (Urlan et. al., 2008) and mixed La-Ni (Crapanzano et al., 2013), Ni-Co oxides (Phongaksorn et al., 2015), V/MgO in the complex with BiMo catalyst (O’Neill and Wolf, 2010), and BiVMo oxides (Yang et al., 2002) as well as by catalysts supported on different carriers, for example, -Al2O3, ZnAl2O4 spinel, MgAl2O4 spinel, and spheres of α-Al2O3 with a washcoating of -Al2O3 (Bocanegra et al., 2009), including zeolites modified with metal nanopowders (Erofeev et al., 2013), with Ga (Choudhary et al., 2000) on usual (Patcharavorachot et al., 2013) and packed-bed membrane reactor (Esche et al., 2012). 2. Experimental The experiments were carried out at atmospheric pressure, 300 - 600 °C, WHSV = 300 - 15,000 h -1 in a continuous-flow unit with a fixed-bed quartz-tube reactor. The gas mixture used for oxidation contained propane and oxygen in a 1 : 2 ratio, as well as C3H8-C4H10 mixture (14 - 80 %) and oxygen (4 - 18 %) in