Fatty Acid Hydrotreatment Using Hypercrosslinked Polystyrene-Supported Pd Catalysts to Produce Biofuels

Abstract

Current work is devoted to the search of novel technologies of biofuel production from non-eatable or waste cooking oils and fats. One of such technique is hydrofining which includes the following processes – hydrodeoxygenation, hydrocracking, hydrogenation – and allows producing 2nd generation biodiesel in form of linear saturated hydrocarbons or alcohols with carbon number of 15-22. Palladium-containing catalytic systems on the base of hypercrosslinked polystyrene (HPS) with different metal loading were studied in stearic acid hydrodeoxygenation and hydrogenation processes to obtain target products (heptadecane and stearyl alcohol) with high yield. It was revealed, that the most effective catalytic system in both processes was the catalyst 1%Pd/MN-270, which allows achieving the high products yield in hydrodeoxygenation process (selectivity regarding n-heptadecane was 99% at 100% substrate conversion) as well as in hydrogenation reaction (selectivity regarding stearyl alcohol was 93% at 100% substrate conversion) of stearic acid.