Bio-lubricant production based on epoxidized oleic acid derived dated palm oil using in situ peracid mechanism

Abstract In recent years, research on the epoxidation of fatty acids has attracted a great deal of attention due to the increased need for eco-friendly epoxides generated from vegetable oils. The purpose of this research is to produce bio-lubricant from optimized epoxidized oleic acid by alcoholysis with methanol, tert-butyl alcohol, and ethanolamine. Epoxidation is carried out using in situ performic acid formation under a constant temperature of 60 °C where formic acid acts as an oxygen carrier and hydrogen peroxide acts as an oxygen donor. The determination of the optimum process parameters uses one factor at a time (OFAT) method and is based on the optimized process parameters until the maximum relative conversion to oxirane of 65% is achieved. The bio-lubricants are confirmed using the Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) analysis and the results show that the hydroxyl group is present at 3400 cm−1 of wavenumber. A kinetic modeling is performed using the MATLAB optimization tool. After 100 iterations, the reaction rate constant based on optimized epoxidized dated palm oil production were obtained as follows: k11 = 0.4251 mol⋅L−1⋅min−1, k12 = 11.345 mol⋅L−1⋅min−1, and k2 = 0.6761 mol⋅L−1⋅min−1.