kinetics study of biodiesel synthesis from sunflower oil using ba-sr/zsm-5 nanocatalyst

in the present research work, the kinetics of sunflower oil transesterification reaction in the presence of ba-sr/zsm-5 nanocatalyst which prepared using incipient wetness impregnation method was investigated. the 10wt.%ba-sr/zsm-5 (sr/ba=3/2) nanocatalyst was calcined at 600 °c for 6 h with a heating rate of 3 ºc/min. the experimental conditions were the methanol/oil 9/1molar ratio, reaction time (0-180 min) and reaction temperature (323–333 k) with mechanical stirring of 500 rpm. an irreversible pseudo-second order kinetics was considered for triglyceride conversion from the best modeling of experimental data. from the kinetic study, ea=67.03 kj/mol and a=9.29×108 1/min were obtained. the yield of the methyl ester products (86.69%) were determined using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. characterization of the catalysts and precursors was performed by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir), scanning electron microscopy (sem), x-ray diffraction (xrd), transmission electron microscopy (tem), and n2 adsorption-desorption measurement methods.