A continuous biodiesel production from the transesteri?cation of soybean oil with methanol was inves-tigated in a ?xed bed reactor packed with D261 anion-exchange resin as a heterogeneous catalyst. Theconversion to biodiesel achieved 95.2% within a residence time 56 min under the conditions: reaction temperature of 323.15 K, n-hexane/soybean oil weight rate of 0.5, methanol/soybean oil molar ratio of 9:1 and feed ?ow rate of 1.2 ml/min. The resin can be regenerated in-situ and restored to the original activity to achieve continuous production after the resin deactivation. The product obtained was mainly composed of methyl esters. No glycerol in the product was detected due to the resin adsorbing glycerol in
the ?xed bed, which solved the issue of glycerol separation from biodiesel. It is believed that the ?xed bed reactor with D261 has a potential commercial application in the transesteri?cation of triglyceride.
