A kinetic model was proposed for the epoxidation of vegetable oils with peracetic acid formed in situ from acetic acid and hydrogen peroxide in the presence of an acidic ion exchange resin as a catalyst. The model is pseudo-homogeneous with respect to the catalyst. Besides the main reactions of peracetic acid and epoxy ring formation, the model takes into account the side reaction of epoxy ring opening with acetic acid. The partitioning of acetic acid and peracetic acid between the aqueous and organic phases and the change in the phases? volumes during the process were considered. The temperature dependency of the apparent reaction rate coefficients is described by a reparameterized Arrhenius equation. The constants in the proposed model were estimated by fitting the experimental data obtained for the epoxidations of soybean oil conducted under defined reaction conditions. The highest epoxy yield of 87.73% was obtained at 338 K when the mole ratio of oil unsaturation:acetic acid:hydrogen peroxide was 1:0.5:1.35 and when the amount of the catalyst Amberlite IR-120H was 4.04 wt.% of oil. Compared to the other reported pseudo-homogeneous models, the model proposed in this study better correlates the change of double bond and epoxy group contents during the epoxidation process.

Epoxidized vegetable oils are widely used in the chemical industry. Their production requires the optimization of process conditions to maximize the epoxy yield. Therefore, the epoxidation of linseed oil with peracetic acid generated in situ in the presence of an ion exchange resin as a catalyst was optimized using response surface methodology combined with Box-Behnken design. The effects of temperature (65?85?C), hydrogen peroxide-to-oil unsaturation mole ratio (1.1:1?1.5:1), catalyst amount (10?20 wt.%), and reaction time (5?13 h) on the epoxy yield were studied. According to analysis of variance, the developed regression model was significant with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 98.95%. Temperature of 70.6?C, hydrogen peroxide-to-oil unsaturation mole ratio of 1.5:1, catalyst amount of 20 wt.%, and reaction time of 7 h were determined as the optimal process conditions using the model. At these conditions, a relative epoxy yield of 84.73?0.07% was achieved, which agreed closely with the predicted value of 87.60%. The epoxidized linseed oil with high epoxy oxygen content (8.27?0.01%) and low iodine number (4.22?0.49 g iodine/100 g oil) was obtained approximately isothermally in a batch process and under relatively mild and safe conditions.

This paper investigates the separation possibilities of model emulsion oil-in-water using polypropylene fibre bed coalescence. Experiments were carried out over a wide range of physico-chemical characteristics of mineral oils, bed permeability and operating fluid velocities. The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of the dispersed oil phase nature and of the bed geometry on the separation efficiency. From the obtained results, it can be concluded that polypropylene fibres in the broadest studied range of bed permeabilities and fluid velocities, effectively separate oil that is highly polar. On the contrary, for the other two investigated oils at low values of bed permeability a region was detected in which the coalescer is incapable to operate. It has to be emphasized that the polypropylene fibres efficiently separate all three investigated oils at the highest studied bed permeability.