To mitigate the environmental and health concerns caused by sulfur (S) in transportation fuels, fuel producers are mandated to produce fuels that contain a maximum level of 15 ppm S.   Sulfur becomes a part of the fuel because it is a component of the feedstocks used to make the fuel.  When these feedstocks are converted to fatty acid methyl esters, commonly known as biodiesel, the product can often have S levels that exceed the mandated levels.  Feedstocks with the highest amounts of S include greases obtained from restaurants and greases obtained from underground grease traps and wastewater treatment plants.  To aid in the development of effective techniques used to remove S by distillation or absorption, the identity of the S-bearing compounds have been determined.  Gas chromatography-pulsed flamed photometric detector (GC-PFPD) methods were developed to separate the S species adequately enough for those peaks to be analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) detector methods.  Accordingly, S-bearing compounds were identified by high probability matches in the MS chemical library or determined from the structural information obtained from MS fragmentation patterns. The results obtained from this study provide a foundation for developing effective purification methods to remove S-containing impurities from waste grease-derived biodiesel.

Identification of sulfur-containing impurities in fatty acid methyl esters produced from brown grease

255th National Meeting (2018)

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