Clay Enriched With Ca2+ and Cu2+ As the Catalyst for the Production of Methyl Esters from CPO on a Laboratory Scale

Indarung clay (Indarung region, Indonesia) has been successfully enriched with Ca2+ and Cu2+ ions. XRF, XRD, FTIR, and SAA analyses confirmed that calcination process had no significant effect on improving its performance so that the clay was simply heated at 383 K before use. Measurements using AAS showed that the clay is enriched with Cu2+ ions more easily than Ca2+ ions. The catalytic activity test carried out for the transesterification of crude palm oilshowed that under the same reaction conditions Cu2+ enriched Indarung clay yields most methyl ester to compare with other four catalysts (Ca2+ enriched clay, parent clay, Ca-nitrate and Cu-nitrate).