Development of Porous WO₃/SAPO-34 Solid Catalyst for the Conversion of Glycerol to Fuel Performance Improving Bio-additive (Solketal)

The present investigation describes the development of environmentally benign WO₃/SAPO-34 solid acid catalyst for glycerol valorization to solketal. Various spectroscopic techniques (XRD, FT-IR, TGA, BET, SEM, EDX and TPD) were employed to evaluate its physiochemical characteristic and determination of acid sites density of the designed catalyst. The optimization of reaction influencing parameters was prudently investigated. The experimental results demonstrated that the catalyst with 20 wt% WO₃ loading exhibited an excellent acetalization performance, providing solketal yield of 96.7% with glycerol/acetone ratio of 1:8, catalyst loading of 5 wt% and reaction time of 4 h at 60 °C temperature. The FTIR and GC–MS analysis justified the successful formation of solketal. Similarly, the WO₃/SAPO-34 catalyst sustained quite good repeatability for up to 5 reaction cycles with no significant loss in the activity.