Abstract
Many inexpensive biofuel feedstocks, including those containing free fatty acids (FFAs) in high concentrations, are typically disposed of as waste due to our inability to efficiently convert them into usable biofuels. Here we demonstrate that carbon derived from waste tires could be functionalized with sulfonic acid (-SO3H) to effectively catalyze the esterification of oleic acid or a mixture of fatty acids to usable biofuels. Waste tires were converted to hard carbon, then functionalized with catalytically active -SO3H groups on the surface through an environmentally benign process that involved the sequential treatment with L-cysteine, dithiothreitol, and H2O2. When benchmarked against the same waste-tire derived carbon material treated with concentrated sulfuric acid at 150 °C, similar catalytic activity was observed. Both catalysts could also effectively convert oleic acid or a mixture of fatty acids and soybean oil to usable biofuels at 65 °C and 1 atm without leaching of the catalytic sites.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4975-4982 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | ChemistrySelect |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 18 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 21 2017 |
Funding
The evaluation of the new materials as novel carbon catalysts was performed equally at Wake Forest University (WFU), Department of Chemistry and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The work at WFU was funded by a National Academy of Sciences award NAS Sub-Grant 2000006099, and the work at ORNL (functionalize carbon to use as a catalyst) was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. The research on the conversion of recycled tires to carbon powders was funded by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Technology Innovation Program. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Wake Forest University Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. A portion of this research was completed at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. ZDH gratefully acknowledges a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1148903) and the Georgia Tech-ORNL Fellowship. Notice: This manuscript was coauthored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, 30332 (USA) [b] Z. D. Hood,+ Dr. M. Chi Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN, 37831 (USA) [c] S. P. Adhikari,+ Prof. M. W. Wright, Prof. A. Lachgar Department of Chemistry Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC, 27109 (USA) E-mail: [email protected] [d] S. P. Adhikari,+ Prof. A. Lachgar Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability (CEES) Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC, 27109 (USA) [e] Y. Li, Dr. M. P. Paranthaman Chemical Sciences Division Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN, 37831 (USA) E-mail: [email protected] [f] Y. Li, Dr. A. K. Naskar, Dr. M. P. Paranthaman The Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Educa-tion The University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN, 37996 (USA) [g] Dr. A. K. Naskar Materials Science and Technology Division Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN, 37831 (USA) [h] Prof. Y. Xia The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, 30332 (USA) [+] These authors contributed equally to this publication Supporting information for this article is available on the WWW under https://doi.org/10.1002/slct.201700869
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| CEES | |
| Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta | |
| Department of Chemistry Wake Forest University | |
| National Science Foundation | DE-AC05-00OR22725, DGE-1148903 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| National Academy of Sciences | 2000006099 |
| Office of Science | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | |
| University of Tennessee | |
| Wake Forest University | |
| University of South Alabama | |
| CenterPoint Energy |
Keywords
- biofuel conversion
- carbon catalysts
- esterification
- free fatty acids
- recycled tires
