Kinetics of Palm Oil Cracking in Batch Reactor

The kinetics of palm oil catalytic cracking over aluminum containing mesoporous silica Al-MCM-41 (5% Al) was investigated in a batch autoclave reactor at the temperatures range of 573 – 673 K. The catalyst was prepared by using sol-gel technique and has been characterized by nitrogen adsorption and x-ray diffraction methods. Surface area of 1276 m/g with average pore diameter of 2.54 nm and pore volume of 0.811 cm/g was obtained. The experimental catalytic cracking runs were conducted using 50 g of oil and 1 g of catalyst. The reaction pressure was recorded at different time intervals and the data were analyzed using LevenbergMarquardt (LM) algorithm using polymath software. The results show that the reaction order was found to be −1.5 and activation energy of 3200 J/gmol. Keywords—Batch Reactor, Catalytic Cracking, Kinetics, Palm Oil.