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Effect of Water Content on Product Distribution of Base-Catalyzed Transesterification

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Abstract

Biodiesel is an environmentally friendly fuel which can be economically produced by the use of waste culinary oil as raw material and NaOH as catalyst. However, the moisture in waste culinary oil or solid NaOH can affect the distribution of final products. In this paper, the water content of solid NaOH and waste culinary oil were determined to be 4.7 and 1.0 % respectively. A simulated transesterification system of methyl butyrate and n-butanol was catalyzed by anhydrous NaOH which was sintered at 800 °C for 2 h. The moistures in reaction system were imitated by contrived addition of water. Experimental results show that when the water content is 0.25 %, the yield of transesterification achieves the highest, simultaneously, saponification remains at the minimum level. The soybean oil and methanol were investigated as exemplary biodiesel system. The results show that when the water content is 1 %, the yield of biodiesel reaches 98.81 %, which is the highest.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21276022), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (FRF-BR-13-006), CNPC Innovation Foundation (2012D-5006-0208), R & D Projects of Applied Technology of Liuzhou Guangxi (2012B030101) and Petro China Company Limited Project (2011B-1303) and Liudong Hightech District Project. Industry-scale manufacture of sucrose esters was used for human friendly detergent.

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  1. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Peng Zhang, Zhidong Chang, Dongyu Wang, Benjamin John Blamo & Wenjun Li

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  1. Peng Zhang
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  2. Zhidong Chang
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Correspondence to Zhidong Chang.

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Zhang, P., Chang, Z., Wang, D. et al. Effect of Water Content on Product Distribution of Base-Catalyzed Transesterification. Waste Biomass Valor 8, 95–102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12649-016-9584-3

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