Produção de hidrogênio e derivados do glicerol pelo processo de reforma eletroquímica

Abstract

The recent increase in biodiesel production due to the tendency to adopt renewable energy sources and government acts has generated a surplus in glycerol. There is a need to develop new applications to glycerol in order to reduce biodiesel production costs by increasing this by-product demand. Among its uses, the reform process, which can be conducted thermally or electrochemically. This process produces H2 and other value- added by-products. However, the reform mechanism is not well understood in terms of reaction pathways, product selectivity by catalyst and operation conditions. The present paper seek to evaluate a PEM cell operation to oxidize glycerol in continuous flux. The chosen catalyst was 20% Pt/C and the experiments were performed in 0.5M H2SO4 and 1M Glycerol + 0.5M H2SO4. Catalyst characterization by cyclic voltammetry and TEM showed a good average particle size, proving the accuracy in selected method to platinum deposition. Polarized samples were analyzed in HPLC and MS. These results suggests glycerol was almost completely oxidized in the sample polarized in 1.1V. It also shows a certain dependency with the applied potential of three by-products detected in chromatograms. The presence of sulfate in the samples made it difficult to conduct the MS experiments, since it was needed to previously extract it to organic fraction. Longer oxidation periods are highly recommended to future works seeking HPLC and MS analysis.