Parametric study on thermal decarboxylation of coconut methyl ester using bentonite as catalyst

Date

6-2015

Degree

Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering

College

College of Engineering and Agro-Industrial Technology (CEAT)

Adviser/Committee Chair

Manolito E. Bambase Jr.

Restrictions

Restricted: Not available to the general public. Access is available only after consultation with author/thesis adviser and only to those bound by the confidentiality agreement.

Abstract

The decarboxylation of coconut methyl ester (CME) was studied using bentonite as the catalyst and kerosene as the solvent. A 23 full factorial design of experiment was employedusing temperature (A), catalyst loading (B), and solvent percent(C) as the factors. Two grades of bentonite were used in the experiment: the technical and the analytical. The catalysts were first subjected to pretreatment through sizing and hydration. Each runused a modified decarboxylation set-up with a reaction time of three hours. Confirmatory tests were done to qualitatively determine the evolution of carbon dioxide in the reaction. The final liquid reaction mixtures from each run were collected for the thin layer chromatography (TLC) analysis. Using the analysis of variance, it was observed that temperature, catalyst loading, solvent percent, interactions ABand ABC resulted to have significant effect on the percent CME reacted. The solvent percentgave the highest effect value of 8.49. Moreover, the highest average percent CME reacted was observed to be50.03±1.99% at high temperature, low catalyst loading, and high solvent percent setting.It was also found out that different grades of catalyst caused significant effect on the percent CME reacted.

Language

English

Location

UPLB Main Library Special Collections Section (USCS)

Call Number

Thesis

Document Type

Thesis

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