Synthesis, characterization and catalytic evaluation of zinc fluorides for biodiesel production

The potential of zinc fluorides with different molar ratios of Zn/F was applied as a solid catalyst in the simultaneous reaction of transesterification and esterification of crude palm oil (CPO) for biodiesel production. These materials were prepared by the fluorolytic sol-gel technique with different fluorine contents. The resulting samples were investigated using elemental analysis, XRD, FT-IR, TG/DTG, N2 physisorption measurements and SEM. The results exhibited that the presence of fluorine strongly affected the catalytic activity in the biodiesel production. The catalysts with smaller fluorine contents (≤1) showed the best performance in all of the observed samples, yields from 92.94 to 89.95, 87.38 and 85.21% with increasing fluorine contents, respectively. The yield toward the formation of biodiesel depended on the phase and particle sizes of catalysts, but it was not influenced by surface area, pore size, and volume of the samples. The recovered catalyst showed a gradual decrease in activity over three cycles of same reactions.