Sustainable upgrading of crude glycerol via ultrasound-reinforced bio-refinery process with oxygen–nitrogen subsistence: Co-application of reusable heterogeneous catalyst

Abstract

Selective/rapid production of value-added glyceryl triacetate (GT) from catalytic transformation of crude glycerol (CG) derived from biodiesel production procedure was systematically investigated using ultrasound-reinforced bio-refinery process with environmental friendliness. Interestingly, the tartaric-magnetic mesoporous alumina (TMMA) was synthesized via hydrothermal aluminization, calcination and functionalization, further applied as an active catalyst for CG acetylation under nitrogen and/or oxygen subsistence. The operative parameters for selective synthesis of GT derived optimization process were in the sequence of TMMA loading amount > ultrasonic level > acetylation time. The GT selectivity and activation energy derived from catalytic acetylation of CG using ultrasonic system were 97.78 % and 44.38 kJ/mol while traditional system were 52.51 % and 60.66 kJ/mol. For catalytic comparison, TMMA catalyst presented better turnover rate of CG transformation than that of marketable catalysts. Moreover, TMMA catalyst could be reused for 15 cycles without notable changing in physicochemical properties such as surface area and acidity which was contributed under oxygen subsistence by oxidative degradation, leading to long-term durability of catalytic performance and long-term repression of polymeric formation. The sustainable application of O2 molecular could perfectly restrain hard polymeric deposition on TMMA structure, leading to facile separation after complete acetylation. This work anticipated that specific integration between TMMA with CG acetylation can be further co-applied for practical process of biodiesel production using ultrasound-reinforced bio-refinery process.