Solid Acid Catalysts for Biodiesel Production

Dear Colleagues,

In view of ever-increasing global energy demands and our commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions, the exploitation of renewable energy recourses has been attracting significant attention. Biofuels are in particular promising sources of low carbon energy which could potentially replace a good majority of fossil fuels. Nevertheless, food security and production cost implications are the major challenges for the commercialisation in this field. While many feedstock sources could have potential for low carbon fuel productions, used and non-edible based feedstocks offer low cost options to overcome the abovementioned challengers. For instance, an enormous amount of waste cooking oil is produced worldwide which could be used as a cheap source of feedstock for the production of biodiesel. However, it should be noted that high level of free fatty acids, moisture and other impurities hinder the transesterification reaction of triglycerides for the biodiesel production in conventional processes using homogenous catalysts. Extensive studies of heterogeneous catalysis for this purpose revealed that care must be taken with the design of active sites and pore architectures.

The use of solid acid catalysts and process intensification are the core themes in this field, and there has been significant effort in the past few decades to design suitable solid acid catalysts which are (i) tolerant to impurities, (ii) highly active (superacidity), (iii) highly stable (robust), (iv) able to facilitate low temperature reactions and (v) easily separable and reusable for continuous operations. This Special Issue is aimed at collating the state-of-the-art of the progress in this field from world-leading academics as well as industrial scientists and researchers.

Prof. Dr. Ali Hassanpour
Dr. Jabbar Gardy
Guest Editors

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