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The growing global demand for petroleum-based products has resulted in increased CO2 emissions, making it imperative to replace them with renewable alternatives. A viable solution to this emerging issue is to develop "tailor-made" fuels from alternate feedstocks such as biomass. In this vein, herein, we describe the synthesis of bioderived ethers for diesel fuel applications. By employing a well-established catalytic strategy known as telomerization, biomass-derived platform chemicals such as isoprene, methanol, ethanol, and butanol were upgraded to long-chain olefinic ethers. Subsequent hydroprocessing of the unsaturated functionalities using catalytic amounts of Pt/C resulted in novel asymmetric branched ethers that consisted of 11–14 carbon atoms (up to 97% yield). The synthesized fuels exhibited flash points ranging from 71 to 100 °C, kinematic viscosities from 1.3 to 2.3 cSt, gravimetric net heats of combustion between 39.3–40.7 MJ/kg, and freezing points below −90 °C. In addition, derived cetane numbers (DCNs) of the fuel mixtures varied from 77 to 96, and normalized soot concentrations (NSC) were well below unity (0.27–0.32), indicating the cleanliness of fuel combustion. The physicochemical and combustion properties of the ethers are further compared to those of other bioethers along with biodiesel and winter diesel.
Desai et al. (Fri,) studied this question.