Bio-lubricant production based on epoxidized oleic acid derived dated palm oil using <i>in situ</i> peracid mechanism
Tunku Arif Zafri Tunku Ozir, Mohd Zulkipli Bin Ab Kadir, Intan Suhada Azmi, Mohamad Zarqani Yeop, Siti Mariam A. Rahman, Mohd Jumain Jalil
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, research on the epoxidation of fatty acids has attracted a great deal of attention due to the increased need for eco-friendly epoxides generated from vegetable oils. The purpose of this research is to produce bio-lubricant from optimized epoxidized oleic acid by alcoholysis with methanol, tert-butyl alcohol, and ethanolamine. Epoxidation is carried out using in situ performic acid formation under a constant temperature of 60 °C where formic acid acts as an oxygen carrier and hydrogen peroxide acts as an oxygen donor. The determination of the optimum process parameters uses one factor at a time (OFAT) method and is based on the optimized process parameters until the maximum relative conversion to oxirane of 65% is achieved. The bio-lubricants are confirmed using the Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) analysis and the results show that the hydroxyl group is present at 3400 cm −1 of wavenumber. A kinetic modeling is performed using the MATLAB optimization tool. After 100 iterations, the reaction rate constant based on optimized epoxidized dated palm oil production were obtained as follows: k 11 = 0.4251 mol⋅L −1 ⋅min −1 , k 12 = 11.345 mol⋅L −1 ⋅min −1 , and k 2 = 0.6761 mol⋅L −1 ⋅min −1 .