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The quest for sustainable resources to meet the demands of a rapidly rising global population represents one of this century’s grand challenges. Biomass offers the most readily implemented, and low cost, solution for transportation fuels, and the only non-petroleum route to organic molecules for the manufacture of bulk, fine and speciality chemicals and polymers required to meet future societal demands. However, careful selection of biomass is critical to ensure such renewable resources are sustainable, and despite initial promise, first-generation bio-based fuels and chemicals (derived from edible plant materials) caused controversy over competition between land-use for fuel crops versus traditional agricultural cultivation. So called 'second generation' bio-based fuels and other chemical materials should thus use biomass sourced from non-edible crop components, e.g. from agricultural or forestry waste, or alternative non-food crops which require minimal cultivation. Crops belonging to the Euphorbiaceous family, which includes the Castor plant Ricinus communis in Tanzania, are advantageous for such applications, growing in the wild in large quantities across tropical and sub-tropical countries. The development of new catalytic routes to convert Castor seed oil to fuels and chemicals would also provide a valuable boost to the agronomy and chemical industries in Tanzania.
Castor oil is mainly comprised of triricinoleate (90 %), trilinoleate (4 %) and trioleate (3 %), which upon transesterification would not only offer a valuable source of fatty acid esters, but also have potential for use a fatty acid based surfactants in the preparation of mesoporous catalyst support materials. Here we report on the application of Castor oil as a renewable soft template to synthesise amine-functionalised mesoporous silicas via a post-synthesis grafting method with 3-(aminopropyl)triethoxysilane. Resulting materials were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Nitrogen physisorption, thermogravimetry (TG), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and diffuse reflectance infrared fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS), and appear well-suited as mesoporous solid bases for catalytic processes. A comparison of the transesterification of castor oil and relevant model triglycerides using the resulting mesoporous solid base and hydrotalcite catalysts will be presented. |
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