33002912

Diesel Oil from Cashew Nut Shell Liquid

Regional sysm.on Chemical Eng 1999
1

NOV/1999

pp3

THA

Paisal Nakpipat1 and Hiroo Niiyama2

Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkuts Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok 10520, THAILAND 2 Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, JAPAN

Most of fuels used in the industries, households, and vehicles are petroleum products. The consumption of these products increases rapidly as the growth rate of the society. In expectation, there will be no more petroleum in the few periods of ten years, so that searching of the alternative fuels becomes more important. The cashew nut shell is the unused byproduct from cashew nut production in the southern, eastern, and northeastern of Thailand. The cashew nut shell consists of the liquid of anacardic acid and its derivatives called Cashew nut shell liquid (CNSL) that can be modified to a fraction of diesel oil by thermal cracking process. Usually, the major compositions of CNSL are 90% of anacardic acid and 10% of cardol, both substances are composed of phenol heads structure and HC tails, and they are easy to be decarboxylated to anacardol or cardanol. Thermal cracking or catalytic cracking of CNSL gives the liquid and gas products, which some fractions of them are nearly diese oil. For this experiment, 100 g of crude CNSL was cracked with 20 g of Molecular Sieve 5 A in 1 liter stainless teel reactor. The reactor being purged with nitrogen (75 ml/min) for 25 minutes, then the vessel was heated up to 500C and kept it constant at this temperature for 2 hour. All the gas came out was partially condensed in the condenser and collected as the liquid product, and the rest was collected as the gas product. For this period o time, no more products came out, the purified liquid product obtained was brown color and strong smell. Analysis of this product with GC got the results as chromatogram, which some parts looked nearly like the diesel.

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