A comprehensive review of low cost biodiesel production from waste chicken fat

Abstract

This paper discusses about the importance of animal fats for power generation particularly from waste chicken fat, advantages of using chicken fat for biodiesel production, different ways of oil extraction from chicken fat and various biodiesel production techniques. A detailed review has been done on the use of novel heterogeneous catalysts for transesterification process such as metal based catalysts and organic catalysts. The factors influencing transesterification parameters like molar ratio, catalyst weight percentage, reaction time and temperature has been collected from several research articles were presented in detail. In addition, the transesterification reaction is studied at different co solvents employed to increase the methyl ester conversion. Also, analyses of relative optimization techniques implementing for transesterification process parameters have been discussed thoroughly. The physico-chemical properties of chicken fat methyl ester such as kinematic viscosity, density, pour, cloud, flash and cold filter plugging point, calorific value and fatty acid compositions of chicken fat methyl ester were compared with different animal fat methyl esters. The study reveals that biodiesel produced from waste chicken fat would be a suitable replacement of edible vegetable oils due to its low cost, ease of availability and the properties of chicken fat methyl ester were within the limits of ASTM D 6751 biodiesel standards. Furthermore, the research work has to be carried out for the improvement of cycles of catalyst reusability, biodiesel purity and cost-effectiveness of biodiesel production process in future.