ABSTRACT
A simple and flexible method was used to develop new alkaline polymer catalyst through radiation induced grafting of glycidylmethacrylate (GMA) onto polyethylene/polypropylene (PE/PP) nonwoven sheet followed by amination reaction and alkalisation. The chemical structure and morphology of catalyst was evaluated by Fourier transform-infrared (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and thermal gravimetric analyzer (TGA). The catalyst was examined for the transesterification of triacetin/methanol mixtures in a batch mode and the obtained methyl ester was detected by GC-MS. In order to optimize the reaction parameters towards getting the higher yield, an artificial neural network (ANN) was used to develop a non-linear model correlating the four independent reaction parameters including catalyst dosage, triacetin/methanol molar ratio, reaction time and temperature. The maximum conversion obtained via the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm was 86.2% at the optimal conditions of 5.01 wt% catalyst dosage, triacetin/methanol 1:12 molar ratio, 8 h reaction time and 62.8°C temperature. Upon using these optimal conditions in the experimental reaction, the conversion of as high as 85% was achieved. These results suggest that the simply modified low cost PE/PP fibrous sheet has a potential to catalyze biodiesel production. Moreover, the combined ANN-SA modelling method is highly effective in predicting the conversion of transesterification reaction and optimizing its parameters.
Funding
The authors from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) wish to acknowledge the financial support from the Research University fund (grant # 09H46).