Pretreating of Unsaturated Fatty Acid for Production of Diesel Fuel Hydrocarbons Using Catalytic Deoxygenation

The catalytic transfer hydrogenation (CTH) is a novel, alternative process for the selective hydrogenation of fatty oils. In this work, linoleic acid, which is an unsaturated fatty acid, is first hydrogenated with aqueous ammonium formate solution over supported palladium catalyst. The progress of the hydrogenation reaction was monitored by determining the iodine value (IV) and fatty acid composition of samples removed periodically during the process. The catalyst could be reused without any adverse effect. Following this, the catalytic deoxygenation of the reduced linoleic  acid to hydrocarbons through decarboxylation/ decarbonylation (deCOx) is done in a semi-batch autoclave over the 5 wt.% Pd/C catalysts used  in the CTH process. Analysis of the reaction mixture at different reaction times indicates that n-heptadecane is the main product, which proves that decarboxylation is the dominant reaction.