Production of glycerol carbonate using crude glycerol from biodiesel production with DBU as a catalyst

The biodiesel production technology catalyzed by 1,8-diazabicycloundec-7-ene (DBU) is developed in this work. Crude glycerol containing DBU and DBU/glycerol/CO2 (DGC) ionic compounds reacts directly with dimethyl carbonate (DMC) to produce high value-added glycerol carbonate (GC) catalyzed by DBU and DGC. The catalytic performance of DBU and DGC, as well as the kinetics of the reaction catalyzed by DBU, were investigated. The results show that DGC has a weak catalytic effect on the transesterification of glycerol and DMC. When the temperature is higher than 60 °C, DGC catalyzes the reaction jointly with DBU, which is produced from the decomposition of DGC. DBU has a good catalytic effect on the reaction between glycerol and DMC, with 90% conversion of glycerol and 84% selectivity to GC under the following conditions: DMC-to-glycerol molar ratio of 3:1, 4.0% DBU (based on glycerol mass), reaction time of 60 min, and reaction temperature of 40 °C. The apparent kinetics results show that the activation energies are 30.95 kJ·mol− 1 and 55.16 kJ·mol− 1 for the forward and reverse GC generation reactions, respectively, and the activation energy of the decomposition reaction of GC to glycidol (GD) is 26.58 kJ·mol− 1.