Biodiesel production using a renewable mesoporous solid catalyst

Heterogeneous solid catalysts have been largely developed for biodiesel production, because of their attractive acid-base properties, strong hydrothermal stability, and efficient recovery/reusability. In this framework, developing bio-waste derived heterogeneous catalysts has attracted immense attention for several catalytic applications, owing to their inexpensive, high abundance, non-toxic, and adequate acid-base properties. In the present work, we investigated the catalytic performance of a biomass-derived orange peel ash (OPA), which contains a porous structure, as a raw heterogeneous catalyst for the transesterification of soybean oil to biodiesel. About 98 % conversion of soybean oil to biodiesel was obtained under the optimized reaction conditions i.e., 6:1 methanol:oil ratio, 7 wt. % catalyst loading, 7 h reaction time at ambient reaction temperature, which ascribed to the presence of abundant basic sites in the developed OPA catalyst. The catalyst can be reused for five successive cycles and shows good stability towards the biodiesel production.