Rational design of hierarchically porous sulfonic acid and silica hybrids with highly active sites for efficient catalytic biodiesel synthesis

Catalysis is the vertebra of most of commercial processes, which utilizes chemical reactions to transform reagents into value added chemicals. Biodiesel synthesis from animal fats and edible vegetable oils via transesterification over homogeneous catalysts is recently taken into account of untenable by the emerging biofuel industries, particularly by virtue of food vs. fuel counteraction, economic and environmental challenges blended with the feedstocks as well as catalytic systems, respectively. Therefore, present efforts concern with the preparation of a novel PTSA-Si catalyst and its relevance for biodiesel synthesis from non-food castor oil. It has been manifested from the experimental outcomes, the most relevant reaction parameters are, 5% PTSA-Si (w/w), 65 ​°C reaction temperature, 1:11 O:M molar ratio and 10 ​h reaction time for 98.56% biodiesel yield. The PTSA-Si was appropriately analyzed using FT-IR, SEM, XRD, BET, TGA-DTA and TPD-NH₃ analysis. Since, castor oil and castor biodiesel were analyzed using FT-IR, ¹H &¹³C NMR analysis. Besides, biodiesel physico-chemical properties were predicted and associated with ASTM fuel standards.