Epoxidation of Soybean Oil under Acid-Free Condition

Abstract

Industrially the epoxidation of soybean oil utilize peracids as oxidizing agents together with strong mineral acids as catalyst. To avoid the corrosive waste and undesirable epoxy-ring opening as well as polymerization under acidic conditions, new green catalytic processes in acid-free system have been paid great attentions in recent years. In this paper, MoO3/Al2O3 simply prepared by impregnation method and mesoporous TS-1 prepared by one-pot hydrothermal method were evaluated as catalysts for the epoxidation of soybean oil with tert-butyl hydroperoxide. Orthogonal experiment design was used to optimize the reaction conditions for MoO3/Al2O3 and the optimized conditions are as reaction temperature of 80°C, reaction time of 4h, the ratio of double bond to TBHP of 1:1.4, and the ratio of Ti to double bond of 1%. Higher than 55.8% of selectivity would be obtained. The synthesized meso-TS-1 displayed worse performance than expected result, only 27.6% of epoxy selectivity at conversion of 38.7%.