It was developed a fixed bed tubular continuous reactor to produce biodiesel, using pellets of aluminum oxide doped
with zinc oxide. The pellets were placed into a tubular reactor as a 30 cm long column (2.65 kg). The reactor was
feed with soybean oil (168 gh−1) and methanol or ethanol (89 gh−1) with the temperature fixed at 100 ◦C. Under these
conditions it was possible to convert soybean oil into biodiesel in up to 75% yield in the case of methanol and 35%
for ethanol. Increasing the temperature to 180 ◦C, it was possible to ethanolise soybean oil with yields up to 78%. It is
important to note that after a steady state is achieved the conversions remained approximately constant with time.
It is also worth to mention that the fixed bed remained active for more than 120h, showing no catalyst leaching or
deactivation, and so far it was not possible to determine its overall productivity.