Highly active and stable magnetically recyclable CuFe2O4 as a heterogenous catalyst for efficient conversion of waste frying oil to biodiesel

By Rehab M. Ali, Marwa R. Elkatory, H. Hamad. 2020

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract For the first time, this work investigates the performance of cuprospinel CuFe2O4 nanoparticles as a heterogeneous catalyst for effective and sustainable biodiesel production via waste frying oil (WFO) transesterification process. The catalyst is successfully synthesized by two methods; co-precipitation (to produce CS1) and combined co-precipitation and hydrothermal (to produce CS2). The cuprospinel catalysts were characterized by TGA, SEM, EDX, HR-TEM, FT-IR, Raman spectroscopy, nitrogen adsorption–desorption and VSM. The hydrothermal treatment increased the catalytic activity of the synthesized CS2 much higher than CS1 which is synthesized by co-precipitation only. The experimental investigations show that the optimum operating conditions are 30 min reaction time, 18:1 methanol to oil molar ratio, 3% wt. of catalyst and 300 rpm reaction speed at 60 °C to produce 90.24% biodiesel yield using CS2. Besides, the kinetic study of the experimental results was in line with the pseudo-first-order and the low activation energy of 37.64 kJ/mole. The thermodynamic parameters suggested that the transesterification is a non-spontaneous endothermic process. The CS2 catalyst was easy recoverable, reusable, and its activity was very stable for 5 times reusing. Therefore, utilizing of CuFe2O4 as a novel heterogeneous catalyst would provide a good manner for biodiesel production.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91c64f35d9d8f4b014bd674e8d90fdac4a77508c

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Citations in the corpus

• Recovery/Reuse of Heterogeneous Supported Spent Catalysts (2021, methodology): “After the reaction time, the catalyst was recovered by an external magnetic field, washed with acetone to remove the adhered oil and glycerol, and dried and reused again without any leaching or any catalytic efficiency reduction even for five reaction cycles [65].”