There is strong economic incentive for valorization of glycerol byproduct from biodiesel production to produce value-added chemicals such as glycerol carbonate that have end use as solvent and plastics. Glycerol carbonates can be produced by carbonylation of glycerol with CO2 under supercritical conditions, or with urea at a milder reaction conditions. The latter route is particularly attractive as high selectivity could be obtained using a new hierarchical Co3O4/ZnO catalyst prepared by dry nanodispersion process. This work investigate the potential reaction enhancement in term of conversion and catalyst life through the use of a microfluidic reactor to manipulate the reaction mixing and a separative membrane for selective removal of ammonia. Catalysts were incorporated into the microchannels cut into the porous stainless steel substrate and stabilized on the SiO2-cladded stainless steel surface by thermal calcinaton. The reaction carried out in the multichannel membrane microreactor showed better conversion and catalyst life, and the selective pervaporative separation of ammonia across the zeolite membrane lead to further conversion increase. High conversion and selective ammonia removal improved product purity (>99 %) that could dispense with downstream needs for product separations and purifications.

Urea carbonylation of glycerol in a zeolite microreactor

246th National Meeting (2013)

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