Avaliação de eficiência de catalisador à base de argila na produção de biodiesel.

Abstract

About 90% of energy consumed worldwide comes from oil, coal and natural gas. With the depletion of energy sources, especially fossil fuels, due to its inability to renew, has motivated the development of technologies to use renewable energy. Biodiesel is biodegradable and renewable, and has physical and chemical characteristics similar to those of fossil diesel. This work aims to verify the efficiency of heterogeneous clay catalyst to obtain biodiesel from soybean oil by transesterification in ethylic. The soybean oil biodiesel and ethanol were characterized on the basis of physicochemical properties, absorption spectroscopy in the infrared (IR) and thermogravimetry (TG). The infrared spectra allowed the chemical analysis of the process by identifying the functional groups present in the samples. In the thermogravimetric curves showed that biodiesel made three steps of mass loss attributed to decomposition / volatilization of ethyl esters. The X-ray powder diffraction and BET analysis provided data similar to those found in the literature, allowing more detailed study of clay evaluated. The characterization of the catalyst, according to a semiquantitative analysis, found that 70% of the composition of aluminosilicates is proving that belongs to the group of smectites. There is a need for changes in methods of production of biodiesel from a primary system (S1) for the use of a reaction system (S2), using experimental design and reducing the amount of experiments, taking as input variables, temperature and catalyst and it was shown that the synthesized samples, which showed a higher conversion into ethyl esters was the sample of 196 0 C and percentage of catalyst 3% of waking up the interest in studying the best conditions to optimize the reaction process.