Because of destructive effects of organic chlorides, elimination of these compounds from contaminated crude oil and its distillates is very crucial for oil refiners. Despite the importance of the subject, limited researches in this field are performed and most of the proposed removal methods are operationally difficult and costly. In the present study, an adsorption process as an efficient technology is proposed and employed to eliminate the organic chlorides compounds from the naphtha fraction of contaminated crude oil. The γ-Al2O3 nanoparticles as an adsorbent are prepared and characterized by XRD, SEM− EDS, and BET analyses. Adsorption experiments are carried out at different operating temperatures and also various initial organic chloride concentrations. The experimental results indicated that the adsorption efficiency reaches to more than 96%, when the initial concentration of the organic chloride in the sample is 8.5 mg/L. The adsorption equilibrium analysis revealed that the Freundlich isotherm model provided the best fit and prediction of experimental data. It was also found that, for all of the verified samples, the adsorption kinetics followed the pseudo-second-order equation well. According to experimental investigations reported in the present work, the sintered γ-Al2O3 nanoparticles would be an effective adsorbent for elimination of organic chloride as a hazardous material from the naphtha distillate of crude oil.
