Transesterificação do óleo de frango empregando diferentes catalisadores

Abstract

The biofuel has been assuming an incresingly important role on the environmental and economic impacts caused by fossil fuels. The biodiesel represents one of the most important biofuel in the current scenery of the expanding renewable fuels, in the energy matrix. The transesterification has prevailed as the companies, which produce this biofuel, most used process. Furthermore, the chicken oil, offal of the slaughtering industry, has good position to contribute with the expansion and diversification of biodiesel, in regions naturally vocationated by the development of the chicken slaughter industry. Moreover, this kind of oil does not compete with the food chain. The reaction of the chicken oil with short-chains alcohols using heterogeneous catalyst allow greatly the cost-cutting, by the fact that heterogeneous catalyst can be reusable in the process of the production of the biodiesel, and also because the chicken oil is an offal of low added value; the same does not occur with the homogeneous catalyst. Given this, the aim of this work was to evaluate some catalysts in the production of esters from the crude and neutral chicken oil. The following catalysts were evaluated: Amberlyst-15, Aberlite IR-120, KSF, ZnO, CaO e methanol as alcohol reagent. The preliminary reactions occurred at 60°C e 80°C, with 5% of catalyst relative to the mass of oil, time of reaction of 5 hours and molar ratio alcohol:oil of 9:1. In this conditions, the catalyst which showed higher conversions, around 77% in esters in the preliminary tests, was the calcium oxide (CaO). A pretreatment was made with the chicken oil, with the aim of improve its properties, reducing its acidity, and with that, a performance comparative outline was made between the crude oil and the neutral one. This comparision allowed the analysis of the use effect of heterogeneuous catalysts that preaches the benefits of using impure oils in biodiesel production reactions. New tests were made with the catalyst CaO by an experimental design in which 3 variables of the transesterification reaction were evaluated: temperature, molar ratio alcohol:oil, and percentage by weight of catalyst. The highest conversions were obtained in the order of 79.8% and 83% for crude and neutral oil respectively, in the conditions of 90ºC of temperature, molar ratio alcohol:oil of 6:1 and 4% in weight of catalyst. The kinetics of the reaction was also evaluated in the following conditions: temperatures of 40ºC, 60ºC and 80ºC, methanol molar ratio: 9:1 oil and 4% by weight of catalyst; in the kinetics tests were obtained conversions of up to 94.11% ester with reaction time of 24 hours. The obtained data of the best performance of the kinetics were used for the evaluation of the mathematical modeling.