Shrimp Shell Catalyst for Biodiesel

13 July 2009

Researchers in China have developed a high-performance and environmentally friendly shrimp shell catalyst for biodiesel production. A report on the work was published online 13 July in the ACS journal Energy & Fuels.

Shrimp shell is an excellent raw material for the preparation of catalyst, due to its wide source, low price, favorable biodegradability, and environment-friendly property. Chitin as the main component of shrimp shell can be transformed into saccharides under certain conditions. Recently, a new class of sulfonated carbons derived through incomplete carbonization of saccharides has been reported to have relatively high catalytic performance for biodiesel production, exhibiting interesting acid catalytic properties. In this study, a novel tristep synthetic strategy was devised to prepare shrimp shell catalyst.

——Yang et al. (2009)

To prepare the catalyst, the researchers incompletely carbonized shrimp shell at 450 °C, loaded KF on the resultant at 25 wt%, and activated it at 250 °C.

When the reaction was carried out at 65 °C with a catalyst amount of 2.5 wt%, a methanol/rapeseed oil molar ratio of 9:1, and a reaction time of 3 h, the highest conversion of 89.1% can be achieved. This finding provides opportunities for obtaining a novel environmentally friendly catalyst for biodiesel production.

—Yang et al. (2009)

Resources

• Linguo Yang, Aiqing Zhang and Xinsheng Zhe (2009) Shrimp Shell Catalyst for Biodiesel Production. Energy Fuels, Article ASAP doi: 10.1021/ef900273y