Kinetics of Soybean Oil Hydrolysis on Niobium Catalysts

Abstract

AbstractThe catalytic hydrolysis of soybean oil was used as an alternative for the production of monoglycerides (MG) and diglycerides (DG). The reactions were conducted in a stainless‐steel tubular reactor in the temperature range of 240–290 °C, on niobium phosphate (NBP) and niobium oxide (NBO) as catalysts. In the hydrolysis reactions at 270 °C, the maximum selectivities of the products of interest were obtained at 22 % MG and 48 % DG for the reaction with NBP, and 7 % MG and 33 % DG with NBO, for 59 % and 36 % of triglyceride conversion in 10 min, respectively. The proposed kinetic model presented a good fit of the theoretical model with the experimental data, showing that the previous hypotheses considered for the mechanism development are suitable for describing the kinetics of soybean oil hydrolysis.