Avaliação de catalisadores de NiO e MoO3, suportados em MCM-41, na obtenção de biodiesel de óleo de algodão.

Abstract

Biodiesel is a biofuel produced from renewable sources such as vegetable oils and animal fat, which was proposed as an alternative to petroleum diesel. Typically, this biofuel is made from soybean oil, by transesterification with alkaline homogeneous catalysts that at the end of the reaction are not reused and still require refined oil. Thus, the use of heterogeneous catalysts has been increasingly in industry by the possibility of its reuse and for allowing the use of different lipid sources. Furthermore, the search for low cost lipid sources, such as cottonseed oil, has become the current focus of several studies. Therefore, the objective of this thesis was to synthesize, characterize and evaluate the catalysts M0O3-MCM-41 and NiO-MCM-41 in ethyl and methyl, transesterification and esterification reactions of cottonseed oil, using a static reaction system. The support MCM-41 was obtained by synthesis at room temperature. The catalysts were synthesized by the method of physical dispersion in three different concentrations (1, 3 and 5% in weight) and were characterized by XRD, FTIR, EDX and textural analysis. Through a 23 factorial design the effects of independent variables: temperature, molar ratio of oil: the percentage of alcohol and catalyst on the dependent variables éster and triglycerides in the transesterification reaction, were evaluated. In the esterification reaction the effects of these variables on the conversion of free fat acid was evaluated. The characterization results indicated that the hexagonal phase of MCM-41 was obtained and the procedure of physical dispersion of the oxides was viable for the synthesis of the catalysts under study. In the catalytic tests the catalyst 5%Mo03-MCM-41 showed the best results for the methyl and ethyl transesterification and for methyl esterification, with conversion of about 53, 48.1 and 78.7%, respectively. For the reaction of ethyl esterification, the catalyst 3%MoC«3-MCM-41 showed the highest conversion, about 67.9%. The catalyst NiO-MCM-41 showed no catalytic activity. The temperature, according to the experimental design, was the variable that most influenced the reactions.