Preparation Of Solid Catalyst And Higher Quality Of Biodiesel

This thesis aims at developing new solid base catalysts for biodiesel production with high catalytic activity, long life time and low cost and optimizing the biodiesel proucing process at industrial level. With artificial zeolite, ZrO₂ andγ-Al₂O₃ as carriers and alkali metals and alkali earth metal salts as hosts, 33 novel binary and ternary solid base catalysts were designed and prepared. And their catalytical activity was evaluated on transesterification process of Jatropha Curcas L.(Guizhou Province) seed oil to fatty acid methyl esters (FAME, biodiesel). The promising catalysts were then further optimized from different aspects, including different ingredient, component ratio, calcination temperature and calcination time, etc., during a series of amplification process from 250 mL to 50 L in scale. And finally two kinds of solid base catalysts, named as fcc-0508 and fcc-0509, were obtained with high catalytic activity, selectivity and long life time. The optimized condition for preparation of fcc-0508 is: components of active ingredient X, auxiliary ingredient Y and supportγ-Al₂O₃ (with the ratio 6:2:10 in weight) were calcinated for 5 h at 600℃. The basic strength and IR spectrum of fcc-0508 was determined. Finally 50 L scale Jatropha Curcas biodiesel production was processed using catalyst fcc-0509 and the most important variables were optimized. It was found that when the transerification reaction was catalyzed with 1% amount of fcc-0509, with 1:10 molar ratio of oil to methanol, under atmosphere pressure and at methanol reflux temperature, more than 93% of the yield and the FAME content were obtained after 5 h reaction, together with more than 90% recovery of methanol and the catalyst. And the recovered catalyst could be recycled many times after simple treatment. The biodiesel produced using this method was found through a series of evaluation to meet all the relative standards including physico-chemical properties as well as engine performances.