Green, cost effective barium loaded montmorillonite catalyst for biodiesel synthesis from waste cooking oil

Abstract

The development of an alternative fuels is potential study as fossil fuels are rolling out. The large scale consumption of fossil fuels in power generation in various sectors, like agricultural process, commercial use, domestic, transport sectors are continuously rising the fuel cost. The use of waste vegetable oils and their derivatives are found to be feasible and effective solution using catalytic process. Among all the catalysts the montmorillonite clay plays a vital role to provide unique structural properties to leads high yield, catalyst recycling, cost effectiveness and eco-friendliness process. An emphasis is given to highlighting the significance of green processes with justified comparison between Ba loaded clay catalysts with respect to reaction conditions to produce biodiesel through transesterification in present of methanol. The wet impregnated Ba/MT catalysts were characterized by the BET, XRD, SEM and CO2-TPD. The transesterification reaction was carried out using different oil: methanol molar ratios are 3:1, 5:1, 7:1, 9:1, 10:1, 11:1, 12:1, 15:1 and 16:1. The catalyst amount was varied from 1 to 6 wt% to identify the effect of catalyst amount on yield percentage. The reaction time from 1 to 6 h at 30 °C to 100 °C also considered as a parameter to estimate the effect on yield. After the screening of all the catalysts the optimized reaction conditions are drawn for the transesterification reaction of oil are methanol to oil molar ratio is 11:1with 3 wt% catalyst at 60 °C for 3 h of reaction time is optimal. The highest activity of the catalyst was accounted due to high crystallinity, surface area and substantial basicity provided by threshold ratio of Ba and clay.