###### Abstract  
Petroleum is an indispensable chemical product in industrial production and daily life. The hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum are important raw materials in the organic chemical industry. The hydrocarbons currently used in industry are usually obtained by fractional distillation of petroleum, which not only consumes more energy, but has poor separation selectivity for some hydrocarbons. Adsorption separation technology has many advantages such as energy saving and high efficiency. It can adsorb and separate hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum with low energy consumption and high selectivity under mild conditions. In this paper, the research progress of adsorption and separation of hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum is reviewed, and various new catalysts and the rules of adsorption and desorption are analyzed. petroleum; hydrocarbon molecules; adsorption and separation; porous materials +
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utilize differences in the boiling points of different hydrocarbons to achieve separation. The shorter the molecular chain of organic matter, the lower the boiling point, the longer the molecular chain, the higher the bpetroleuming point. The main device used in fractionation technology is a fractionation tower. In the fractionation tower, the temperature varies from area to region, which makes hydrocarbon molecules with different boiling points condense into liquid fractions at different heights. During the fractionation operation, the petroleum vapor is passed into the fractionation tower at a high temperature, and height affects the type of product deposition, so as to achieve the purpose of separating hydrocarbon molecules [9]. For the azeotropic mixture, a series of special rectification methods such as extractive rectification, azeotropic rectification, and pressure swing rectification can also be used for separation. These processes are all physical change processes, and the separated hydrocarbon molecules can be used in different chemical production activities. In addition, long-chain hydrocarbons can be further processed by thermal cracking or hydrocarbons to produce short-chain hydrocarbons, however, the fractional distillation technology also has certain limitations [10]. For example, some hydrocarbon molecules, such as n-paraffin, have a long boiling range, and there are many isomers with boiling points close to n-paraffin in the raw material. It is impossible to use the rectification method to realize the separation of n-paraffins. These limitations indicate that a new separation method is urgently needed in the field of petroleum separation. At the same time, the pollutants caused by petroleum spills are also difficult to be separated by conventional methods [11; 12; 13]. They are usually highly lipophilic, semi-volatile, and accumulated in water, which bring great pollution to local water sources due to their non-biodegradability and persistence, especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and phenols. when present in living cells, they can bioaccumulate and biomagnify through the food chain and enter the human body [14], therefore the separation of these aromatics from contaminants is particularly important. Adsorption separation technology has many advantages such as energy saving and high efficiency, which has attracted extensive attention in the research field. The principle of adsorption separation is that when the liquid petroleum is in contact with a porous material with a large surface area, hydrocarbon molecules smaller than the diameter of the pore of the adsorbent will enter the pore. After the adsorption is completed, the adsorbed molecules can be desorbed by changing the conditions to obtain the target product. For example, in the separation of aromatic hydrocarbons, high-purity aromatic hydrocarbons can be obtained by using a desorbent to desorb the adsorbed aromatic hydrocarbon components after the adsorbent selectively adsorbs the aromatic hydrocarbons.