Poster Presentation 1B-62

Kinetics of Enzyme-Catalyzed Transesterification of

Soybean Oil in n-Hexane

Débora de Oliveira,^* Irajá do Nascimento Filho, Marco Di Luccio, Carina Faccio, Clarissa Dalla Rosa, João Paulo Bender, Nádia Lipke, Cristiana Amroginski and José Vladimir de Oliveira

Department of Food Engineering

URI-Campus de Erechim

Av. Sete de Setembro, 1621

Erechim, RS, Brazil, 99700-000

Phone: (+55) 54-5209000

Fax: (+55) 54-5209090

E-mail: odebora@uricer.edu.br

Biotransformation of vegetable oils through the use of enzymes as catalysts is been a matter of intense investigation. Fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) obtained from vegetable oils, a renewable resource, show large potential applications as additive to mineral diesel, known as biodiesel, due to the possibility of improving ignition quality, reduction of environmental investments and import needs. In this context, this work is aimed at investigating the production of FAEE’s from soybean oil, a raw material plenty available almost worldwide, using n-hexane as solvent and two commercial lipases as catalysts, Novozym 435 and Lipozyme IM. For this purpose, a Taguchi experimental design was adopted considering the variables temperature (35-65^oC), water (0-10 wt/wt%) and enzyme (5-20 wt/wt%) concentrations and the oil to ethanol molar ratio (1:3 to 1:10). An empirical model was then built so as to assess the main and cross variable effects on the reaction conversion and also to maximize the biodiesel production for each enzyme. It is shown that complete conversion in FAEE’s is achieved for some experimental conditions tested. Besides conversion values, kinetics of the enzymatic reactions is presented for selected conditions of the experimental design.