“…Such as been previously speculated, and a proposed mechanism can be seen in Figure 7, in this case specifically for a Brönsted acid catalyst [18]. In general, the reaction is kickstarted when the catalyst interacts with the carbonyl of the substrate, either by protonation or coordination with a metal site (for Brönsted and Lewis acids, respectively) [35,41,42,55]. This interaction forms a protonated intermediate structure that, when interacting with the hydroxyl groups in glycerol, originates a hemiketal/hemicetal.…”