Conversion of glycerol to methanol in the presence of zeolite based catalysts

While the production of biodiesel increased, significant amounts of glycerol, a byproduct that will become abundant if large scale bio-diesel production is implemented. The glycerol byproduct amount to about 10 wt% of the total biodiesel produced. Rather than consider the crude glycerol as a waste as a result of the increased amount of glycerol byproduct, many research being done to convert glycerol to value added products. There is no previous study on the direct conversion of glycerol to methanol. Therefore, this preliminary work studied the effect of metal loading on zeolite on the conversion and yield of methanol. Zeolite HZSM-5 was loaded with different amount of Nickel and Copper. The experiments were carried out in the presence of Nitrogen as carrier gas by using fixed bed reactor at 500°C and atmospheric pressure. The catalysts were characterized by XRD while the products were analyzed by GC-FID for calculation of conversion and yield of methanol. The results from the experiments suggested that Cu/HZSM-5 had the highest conversion and methanol yield with 100% and 6.70% respectively.