Abstract

The transesterification reactions of sunflower and corn oils in supercritical methyl and ethyl acetates in a tubular flow reactor without catalyst were studied. The residence time of the reaction mixture was ~2.9 min. The reaction of sunflower oil in supercritical methyl acetate yielded a large amount of free fatty acids and respective esters. The fraction of free fatty acids among the reaction products at high temperatures attained 50%. The product distributions in the transesterification reactions of vegetable oils with supercritical methyl and ethyl acetates were studied in detail. The methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the reaction products have been developed.