Synthesis Acetylation of Glycerol Using Batch Reactor and Continuous Reactive Distillation Column

Abstract

Biodiesel production from vegetable oil produces glycerol as by-product with the amount of about 10 wt% of its product. This excessive amount of glycerol needs to be converted into the higher valuable product. One of the prospective glycerol’s derivatives is triacetin, a good bio-additive as anti-knocking agent. The synthesis of triacetin from glycerol and acetic acid using sulfuric acid catalyst has been performed in batch and continuous process. In this work, triacetin was synthesized using batch reactor to give 96.30% of glycerol conversion and 20.50% of triacetin selectivity. Meanwhile, the production using continuous reactive distillation resulted in glycerol conversion of 98.51% and 8.84% of triacetin selectivity.