Biodiesel industry growing at a faster rate with an unintentional overflow of its by-product, glycerol. The surplus amount of glycerol in the market hampering the biodiesel profitability margin. Hence there is an urgent need to valorize glycerol into value-added chemicals. In the present study, a surfactant-free mesoporous catalyst, K-TUD-1, was synthesized for the one-pot conversion of glycerol into glycerol carbonate. The solvent extraction technique was adopted to remove the surfactant effectively without damage the structure of the TUD-1. This material is superior to other mesostructured material due to its 3-D porous structure in which active species can be confined effectively and easy accesses even at large reactant species. The basicity of TUD-1 was improved with the incorporation of active metal species (potassium) in different wt. % on TUD-1 and it found that 7 wt. % of K on TUD-1 showed better catalytic activity for the conversion of glycerol to glycerol carbonate. The physicochemical properties of the prepared catalyst were investigated by deploying various characterization techniques. Small-angle XRD revealed that TUD-1 posses mesostructure in nature. SEM analysis showed that TUD-1 exhibited a 3D structure without observing any agglomeration. The influence of reaction parameters such as reaction temperature, reaction time, catalyst dosage, and DMC/glycerol molar ratio was studied in detail. Under optimized conditions, 91.53 % yield of glycerol carbonate observed with DMC/glycerol molar ratio of 5, catalyst dose of 6 wt. % (of glycerol mass ), reaction temperature of 90 <sup>o</sup>C, and reaction time of 2.5 h. Further, the reusability of the catalyst was also conducted under optimized conditions. The kinetics of the reaction was studied using the ODE 15s solver in MATLAB.

One-pot synthesis of glycerol carbonate from glycerol over K-TUD-1 mesoporous catalyst

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.