Extraction and Characterization of Pequi Seed Oil for Biodiesel Production: A Green Management of Waste to Biofuel Using Ethanol and Heterogeneous Catalysis

• Autor(a) principal: Guimarães,Munique G.
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Evaristo,Rafael B. W., Macedo,Julio L. de, Ghesti,Grace F.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-50532022000400327
• topic: agroindustrial residues; pequi seeds; biodiesel; simultaneous extraction/production; heterogeneous catalysis

This work reports the characterization of a vegetable oil extracted from pequi seeds, an agroindustrial residue, and its biodiesel production using ethanol and heterogeneous catalysis. The pequi seeds showed 40.73 wt.% of extractive content, which represents a large amount of the biomass composition. The crude oil extracted from the pequi seeds with ethanol as solvent presented a high content of free fatty acids (FFAs), mainly oleic (54.14%) and palmitic (36.71%) acids, resulting in an acidity value of 13.8 ± 0.1 mg KOH g-1. The esterification/transesterification process was performed using two ion exchange resins as heterogeneous catalysts, a commercial protonic form (assigned as PR) and a zirconium-exchanged (assigned as PRZr). Conversions of 87.1 and 91.4% were achieved for PR and PRZr as catalysts, respectively, at optimal conditions (1:6 oil-to-alcohol molar ratio, 25 wt.% of catalyst, 100 ºC and 1 h). These results indicated that heterogeneous acid catalysts can be successfully applied in biodiesel production from fatty acid-rich oils, such as the one extracted from pequi seeds. Also, a simultaneous process involving both oil extraction and biodiesel production was tested using PRZr as catalyst (25 wt.% of catalyst and 100 ºC), but due to the greater amount of ethanol necessary for the oil extraction (1:16 oil to alcohol mass ratio) the conversion reached only 51.5% after 5 h. For that reason, this work proposes a two stage system for biodiesel production that integrates oil extraction (stage one) and the esterification/transesterification reaction (stage two) to achieve a greener process, waste-to-bioenergy.