Near-room temperature transesterification over bifunctional CunO-Bs/SBA-15 catalyst for biodiesel production

The transesterification of triglycerides is a critical step in biodiesel production. In this work, by loading boron-doped copper oxides onto SBA-15 mesoporous molecular sieve, an acid-base bifunctional catalyst (i.e., CunO-Bs/SBA-15) was prepared and applied to triglyceride transesterification. Compared with pure copper, sodium or boron oxides-based catalysts, CunO-Bs/SBA-15 enabled a higher biodiesel yield (>97.5%) at near room temperature (i.e., 40 °C) in 120 min. The characterization results showed that after B doping, the CunO-Bs/SBA-15 catalyst contained highly-dispersed acid-base sites without blocking the channels of porous SBA-15 support, which had good catalytic performance. Finally, in-situ DRIFTS was used to reveal the catalytic mechanism of the acid-base bifunctional groups of the as-prepared CunO-Bs/SBA-15 during transesterification.