Hydrocarbon Biofuel Production by Hydrocracking Process with Nickel-Iron Supported on HZSM-5 Catalyst

Abstract

The production of hydrocarbon biofuel from coconut oil can substitute for fossil fuels to reduce the environmental issues. Hydrocracking is an effective method that can convert vegetable oil into biofuel using catalyst. In this experiment, nickel-iron was combined with HZSM-5 catalyst to produce biofuel. Hydrocracking of coconut oil was carried out in a batch reactor over Ni-Fe/HZSM-5 catalyst at a temperature of 350 and 400 °C for 2 h. Liquid hydrocarbon biofuel product was analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Based on GC-MS analysis, processing at the temperature of 350 °C produced sample containing 72.56% carboxylic acids. When the temperature increased to 400 °C, the carboxylic acids decreased rapidly from 72.56% to 24.83%. Analysis results suggested that increase of temperature promoted to the increase of desirable content, hydrocarbon compounds. At the same like, it also suppressed formation of undesirable compounds: acids, ketones, phenols, alcohols, and esters. Overall, synthesized catalyst in this study improved production of n-paraffin compounds such as (tridecane (n-C13), tetradecane (n-C14) and pentadecane (n-C15)) as high 71.85%.