3.5. Reaction mechanism
Transesterification reaction takes place on the surface of solid base catalyst. As described in Fig. 7, surface O2 extracts H+ from CH3OH to form surface methoxide anion (step 1) Triglyceride is adsorbed on the catalyst with physisorption or chemisorption
(step 2). Then methoxide anion attacks the carbonyl carbon of triglyceride to form the tetrahedral intermediate (step 3). Subsequently, the tetrahedral intermediate is rearranged to form methyl ester and diglyceride anion (step 4). At last,diglycerideanion picks up an H+ from the surface of CaO–MgO–Fe2O3–Al2O3–SiO2 to form diglyceride (step 5)
Afterwards, diglyceride is transformed to monoglyceride and then glycerol by repeating the above steps. Adsorption (step 2) makes the nucleophilic attack (step 3) easier, for the reason that the distance of methoxide anion and triglyceride is shortened. And the adsorption between CaO–MgO–Fe2O3–Al2O3–SiO2 and triglyceride is easy because CaO–MgO–Fe2O3–Al2O3–SiO2 has many surface adsorption sites. Additionally, this kind of composite metal oxide has many reactive sites. For these reasons, the water scale-derived catalyst has a really pretty high catalytic activity for transesterification reaction.