Avaliação da interesterificação catalítica de óleo de macaúba com acetato de metila

Abstract

The world concern about the increasing of energy demand, depletion of fossil fuel reserves and global warming aroused interest in biodiesel production. Commonly produced through basic homogeneous transesterification, the increase in biodiesel production resulted in an overproduction of glycerol. Thus, the aim of this study was to promote and evaluate interesterification reaction of macaw oil with methyl acetate over different heterogeneous catalysts (γ-alumina, zeolite HY, niobium phosphate and niobic acid), for production of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) and triacetin, compound with high added value, considered an additive to biodiesel, instead of glycerol. The catalyst γ-alumina presented superior results when the reaction conditions were 250 °C, 5% mass of catalyst and molar ratio methyl acetate to oil of 30:1 and in 1 hour of reaction it was reached 54.07% (w/w) of FAME and triacetin content. At these conditions the catalyst was recovered and reused without treatment for at least 5 cycles without significant catalytic activity loss. Also, the influence of temperature (225 °C to 300 °C), catalyst mass (2 to 10% of oil mass fed) and methyl acetate to oil molar ratio (10:1 to 40:1) were evaluated. FAME and triacetin content of 48.96% (w/w) and 1.84% (w/w) were achieved for 300 °C, 2% of γ-alumina and molar ratio of 20:1, in 1 hour of reaction which corresponds to 82.5% of conversion considering the convertibility of macaw oil to esters and triacetin of 61.6% (w/w). The catalyst was recovered and reused without treatment for at least 4 cycles and did not present significant catalytic activity loss.