Triacylglycerol-based oils and fats have been increasingly employed as refinery
feedstocks, replacing traditional petroleum feedstocks. However, they readily decompose
into relatively reactive species containing oxygen and/or acidic moieties, raising
concerns about their detrimental effect to piping and process equipment. Despite these
concerns, there is limited existing knowledge on the corrosion mechanisms of
biofeedstocks on carbon steels under process conditions. There is a crucial need to
expand our understanding of how biofeedstocks induce corrosion and develop new methods
for quantifying and predicting their corrosive effect.In this work, we systematically
characterized the corrosion behavior and thermal decomposition of various
biofeedstock/white oil blends at elevated temperature and pressure over 30 hours. The
corrosion is characterized via mass change and transmission electron microscopy (TEM)
while the chemical evolution of the biofeedstocks is characterized via Fourier transform
infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. In this work, the corrosion rate of
steel coupons increased non-linearly with biofeedstock concentration and autoclave time.
Interestingly, our experiments show that the presence of the carbon steel in the
autoclave accelerates the triacylglyceride hydrolysis into fatty acids, which in turn
accelerates the corrosion rate. Simultaneously, we will describe our efforts to
characterize and understand the thermal decomposition of the triacylglycerol throughout
the autoclave process. This work will inform our future efforts to be able to predict
the corrosivity of biofeedstocks as well as develop methods to limit the corrosivity of
the solutions.
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