Catalytic cracking of non edible vegetable oils to biofuel over nanosized microporous mesoporous and composite catalysts

Abstract

Fuels (liquid and gaseous) obtained from biomass are generally termed as biofuels. A good biofuel should be biodegradable, environmentally benign, sustainable and should have a shorter CO2 cycle. The rapid decrease in fossil fuels resource and increase in environmental pollution and hike in petroleum price have made the researchers to search for alternative fuels from renewable source. In recent years vegetable oils such as soyabean, canola, cotton seed, rubberseed, canola and palm oil have been used by the researchers for the production of biofuels. Biofuel can be produced by various methods like transesterification, pyrolysis, fermentation and catalytic cracking. But all the biofuels are not same; some are better than others. In this work catalytic cracking technique was chosen to produce biofuel. The recent focus is on non-edible vegetable oils which does not affect the farm land, as it can be grown on waste lands. In this work non-edible oils like Jatropha oil, castor oil, pongamia oil and neem oil were used as feedstock for the production of biofuel. Among them jatropha oil was found to be the best. Nanosizedmicroporus catalysts such as nanoHY, nano HZSM-5 and nanoHbeta zeolites and mesoporous catalysts such as AlSBA-15, AlKIT-6 of different Si/Al ratio (20,50,100) were synthesized. Composite catalysts such as nano HZSM-5/AlSBA-15 and nano HZSM-5/AlKIT-6 of different percentages of coating (5%, 10% and 15%) were synthesized. newline