Synthesis of Jet Fuel from Glycerol and <i>tert</i>-Butyl Alcohol under Microwave Irradiation
Ruru Zhou, Yuanyuan Jiang, Boyong Ye, Huaiyuan Zhao, Zhaoyin Hou
Abstract
Biodiesel is an excellent renewable fuel, but a large amount of glycerol formed along with the manufacture of biodiesel. Catalytic production of jet fuel via etherification of glycerol and tert-butyl alcohol could pave a way for the valuable utilization of the surplus byproduct. In this work, the synthesis of jet fuel from glycerol with different energy supply methods was explored over a series of solid acids. It was found that a copolymer of divinylbenzene and p-styrenesulfonic acid (PS-x) exhibited excellent performance and stability for this reaction, and microwave irradiation can accelerate this process noticeably. The detected conversion of glycerol reached 81.3% at 80 °C within 1.5 h under 300 W microwave irradiation, and the highest turnover frequency of each acid site in PS-0.2 attained 415.9 h–1. Characterization results indicated that PS-0.2 possessed a high acidity (0.9 mmol/g) and a large surface area (770.6 m2/g) with a hierarchical pore structure. At the same time, kinetic analysis also disclosed that microwave irradiation can decrease the activation energy of this reaction compared with that of a conventional heating method.