H. Francis Webster

Current research projects

Valorization of Waste Glycerol from Biodiesel Production

Interest in alternative fuels has increased dramatically in recent years due to the rising cost and environmental concerns related to fossil fuels. Biodiesel represents a non-toxic, carbon-neutral fuel that can partially reduce dependence on petroleum based fuels. Concerns exist, however, related to the fate of the large quantity of crude glycerol produced in the transesterification of vegetable oils. Approximately 10% of the original oil ends up as crude glycerol which amounted to over 1 million metric tons in 2008.

With this ever increasing surplus of crude glycerol, many research efforts have centered on novel methods to better utilize this product, but much of the excess is now simply incinerated due to the purification costs required to remove the spent catalyst, water, methanol and fatty acids. In this work, we address the challenge of producing a value-added product from crude glycerol.

Functionalized amorphous carbon nanoparticles (typically < 50nm) can be produced through the very careful dehydration of crude glycerol using sulfuric acid as a dehydrating agent. The resulting carbon "gel" produced is shown at the left, and this material can be freeze dried and used as a catalyst or adsorbent, combined with magnetite to form highly functional magnetic composites, or used "as is" in suspension to construct unique layer-by-layer assemblies.

Shown to the right is a plot of the percent conversion for the esterfication of oleic acid with methanol using our carbon catalyst. The results show superior performance when compared to the commercial solid acid catalysts, Amberlyst and SAC-13.