Abstract

A fundamental study on uncatalyzed esterification of various biomass-derived aliphatic carboxylic acids with stoichiometric amount of ethanol has been investigated in an isothermal batch reactor, with the objective to convert carboxylic acids to corresponding ethyl esters and to determine both the kinetic and thermodynamic parameters. The effects of temperature on the conversion of carboxylic acid, kinetic and thermodynamic parameters have been investigated. Temperature was found to have significant effect on the rate of reaction and conversion of carboxylic acid. A simple second order reversible kinetic model was developed to determine the kinetic and thermodynamic parameters. The thermodynamic and kinetic parameters varied for uncatalyzed esterification reaction of both short-chain and long-chain carboxylic acids considered. The predicted data from the kinetic model were correlated with experimental data and the two sets of data agreed reasonably well for the uncatalyzed esterification systems. It was observed that the Van’t Hoff plot for uncatalyzed esterification of linoleic acid was non-linear curve, whereas for the Arrhenius and Eyring plots, they were linear. Additional experiments to assess the catalytic and corrosion effects of several metallic substances revealed Inconel 625 alloy, nickel wire and stainless steel materials were susceptible to corrosion problem with uncatalyzed esterification reaction at elevated reaction temperatures. However, tantalum and grade-5 titanium materials were corrosion resistance metals, suitable for similar reaction conditions and this can encourage the design of a flow reactor system. Although, uncatalyzed esterification of carboxylic acids at elevated reaction temperature is still at laboratory scale. It is our hope that the estimated kinetic and thermodynamic parameters would be the guiding tools for reactor scale-up, thus providing a new perspective into the conversion of biomass-derived carboxylic acids into value-added ester products under uncatalyzed esterification reaction system.

Keywords:

Acid-catalyzed reaction, biomass derived-chemicals, catalysis reaction, esterification reaction, homogenous and heterogeneous catalyst, kinetic and thermodynamic parameters, uncatalyzed reaction,

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