Hierarchical porous SAPO-34 decorated with Mo and W oxides for concurrent transesterification-esterifications for efficient biodiesel production from acidic soybean oil

Hierarchical porous materials have gained much attention as promising heterogeneous catalyst supports due to their high efficiency of mass transfer and high exposure of active centers. In this research, the hierarchical porous SAPO-34 support with microporous, mesoporous, and macroporous hierarchical structure was initially prepared by in-situ alkali etching. Then, Mo and W oxides were incorporated into this hierarchical porous support by using the impregnation method to prepare Mo15W15/HSAPO-34/70 catalyst. This developed catalyst was applied to concurrently catalyze the oil transesterification and free fatty acid (FFA) esterification to biodiesel as the low-value oils severed as feedstocks. The textural and physicochemical properties of the nanocatalysts were evaluated by XRD, XPS, SEM, EDS, TEM, UV–vis, NH3-TPD, Py-FTIR, and nitrogen porosimetry measurement. This catalyst had hierarchical porous structure to ameliorate the large oil molecular transfer, and featured dual Brønsted-Lewis acid sites to synergistically boost the catalytic efficiency for the biodiesel production. Over this catalyst, the oil conversion of 90.1 % and full FFA conversion were achieved under optimized operation conditions, therefore imparting to one-pot conversion to biodiesel with low-value oils as feedstocks. In addition, this catalyst not only exhibited superior tolerance to moisture and FFAs, but also retained high activities after five reuse cycles, thus revealing its tremendous potential of being used in durable and efficient biodiesel production. The present work opens a new avenue for synthesizing a robust solid acid catalyst to achieve a one-pot biodiesel production from low-value oils.