Mechanistic investigation into water tolerance of non-catalytic biodiesel conversion

Abstract

This study provides a systematic approach to understand the water tolerance of a newly developed noncatalytic biodiesel conversion process. The influence of water on the non-catalytic biodiesel conversion process was compared directly with the conventional transesterification reaction, which uses homogenous catalysts, such as KOH and H2SO4. This study demonstrated that water had no significant impact on non-catalytic biodiesel conversion and the conversion efficiency reached approximately similar to 98 +/- 0.5% at a water content of 5 wt.% in the biodiesel lipid feedstock (i.e., corn oil). However, this work showed that the non-catalytic biodiesel conversion using porous hydrophobic materials (i.e., charcoal) exhibited better biodiesel conversion performance compared to non-catalytic biodiesel conversion in the presence of activated alumina. This can be explained by the mechanism of the reaction between gas-phase MeOH and liquid-phase triglycerides.