The extensive use of the renewable plant oil-derived polyols could be hindered by its low hydroxyl value owing to the oil saturation level and structural limitations. In recent years, olefin cross-metathesis has turn out to be one of the attractive methods to overcome this constraint by redistributing alkenes fragments and regenerating carbon-carbon double bonds in the plant oil. The product distribution of the cross-metathesis of plant oil is significantly influenced by the types of catalysts and olefin as well as reaction conditions. Accordingly, dissimilar from the extensive reviews on the types of bio-based feedstocks and catalysts for cross metathesis, this article evaluates in specific the operating condition of cross-metathesising the plant oils using different olefins and catalysts, aiming to identify the future research avenues in developing a more technical feasible process to value add the plant oil. It is anticipated that the product yield resulted from the cross-metathesis of another potential feedstocks, the palm oil could be increased within a practical timeframe using 1-propene or 1-octene with a temperature not more than 60 °C and catalyst loading in ppm level.

Palm oil is one of the important raw materials in the oleochemical industry for downstream expansion and sustainability. The built-in functionality and availability of oil worldwide make palm oil more attractive. It can be further modified using the cross-metathesis process for the production of bio-based polyol. In this study the cross metathesised palm oil was pre-treated with different types of pre-treatment methods namely transesterification, silylation, methylation and dilution to find the best pre-treatment method. Moreover, the pre-treated samples were analysed using two different Gas chromatography columns installed to the Gas chromatography flame ionisation detector (GC-FID). The best pre-treatment method was then used to prepare the samples taken from the palm oil octenolysis at different molar ratio of palm oil to 1-octene. According to the findings of this research, dilution method outperformed other pre-treatment methods.

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