Synthesis and characterization of mesoporous Co/ZSM5 catalyst and activity study on transesterification reaction

The early development of biodiesel production process has used basic homogeneous catalyst such as NaOH or KOH in methanol or ethanol. Hence, nowadays a lot of heterogeneous catalysts have been developed in transesterification reaction for triglyceride conversion, usually vegetable oil, to Fatty Acid Methyl Esters (FAME), the main component of biodiesel. In this work, the heterogeneous catalyst used is mesoporous Co/ZSM5 zeolite. The initial mesoporous NaZSM5 zeolite is synthesized by using double template methods with tetra propy lammonium hydroxide (TPAOH) as structure directing agent and poly dialil methyl ammonium chloride (PDDA) as mesoporous template. The cobalt (Co) species was introduced to zeolite through impregnation with incipient wetness. The result of characterization on ZSM-5 and Co/ZSM5 show that the structure of as-synthesized zeolite is ZSM5 (XRD pattern), the Si/Al ratio is 12.98 and the Co loaded are 2.53 (w/w)%. The mesoporous Co/ZSM5 catalyst activity test was carried out in transesterification reaction, in which the Crude Palm Oil (CPO) as substrate was mixed with methanol in the present of zeolite catalyst (10% substrate) to be converted to FAME. The reaction was set at 95 °C and the reaction time was varied from 0 to 8 hours. The product was then measured and analyzed with GC-FID. The conversion of CPO to FAME using Co/ZSM5 as catalyst is still inferior compared to basic catalyst. However, when the catalyst was applied for the transesterification process with commercial cooking oil, the yield of FAME reached 41.87 (w/w)%.