Routing Optimization Studies On The Synthesis Of Trimethylolpropane Tri-esters By Ti-Zr Solid Acid

Vegetable oil is one of the renewable base materials in the world, and transformingvegetable oil into biolubricant base oil using chemical methods would make vegetable oilmore valuable and help to resolve the increasingly environment problems and energy crisis.It’s so important to the society we live that we would not totally rely on petroleum oil anymore. Unfortunately, the way to produce biolubricant with vegetable oil is still in lab research.Among all the methods, chemical modifications are conmmonly used, but they are restrictedin extensive applications because of inefficient catalyst performance and complex purificationunits.In this paper Ti-Zr solid acid was screened and prepared for further use from severalcatalysts used in chemical modifications. The structure and catalysis performance of Ti-Zrsolid acids were characterized by FTIR, XRD and esterification reactions, which showed thatthe TiO2:ZrO2=1:1solid acid had a better TE yield rate than others. Then the TiO2:ZrO2=1:1solid acid was utilized in TMP and oleic acid (OA) esterification for investigating optimalreaction conditions. The results showed that when the condition parameters (temperature, OAand TMP moral ratio, time and catalyst loading) were180℃,4.2:1,6h and0.5wt%,respectively, high TMP conversion rate (99.6%) and TE yield rate (96.9%) were obtained.With the optimal reaction conditions, the reaction product was purified by bleaching andmolecular distillation. After bleaching and molecular distillation treatment, free fatty acidcontent in the product decreased from62.7%to2.2%and TE content increased from36.7%to97.6%. TE was one of the high performance biolubricant base oils since it owned highviscosity index, low pour point and good lubricating performance, et al. The performance testresults showed that acid value, pour point and viscosity index of TE were0.34mgKOH/g,-24℃and181, respectively.Based on the optimal reaction conditions and treatment parameters, a5000t/a TEproduction routing process was obtained. The economic estimates result showed that theprocess would profit more than7million yuan per year and gain8.0%after-tax rate under thehypothesis conditions. Therefore, the TE production process using vegetable oil as rawmaterial would have a good application potential in biolubricant production.