Manufacturing of environment friendly biolubricants from vegetable oils

Abstract

Environment friendly products such as fuels and lubricants are among the candidates which are studied in several countries including Egypt. The purpose of this work was to utilize commercially available palm oil and Jatropha oil for the production of biolubricants, through two stages of Transesterification. The first stage is the process of using methanol in the presence of potassium hydroxide to produce biodiesel. The second stage is the reaction of biodiesel with trimethylolpropane using sodium methoxide as catalyst to yield palm or Jatropha oil base trimethylolpropane esters (biolubricants). Palm oil based trimethylolpropane esters with yield of 97.8% was obtained after 4h of reaction at 130°C. Under similar reaction conditions, Jatropha oil based trimethylolpropane esters with a yield of 98.2% was obtained. The resulting products were confirmed by FTIR and evaluated by ASTM analyses. The obtained Jatropha oil based trimethylolpropane esters exhibited high viscosity indices (140), low pour point temperature (−3°C), and moderate thermal stabilities and met the requirement of commercial industrial oil ISO VG46 grade. In spite of the high pour point of Palm oil based trimethylolpropane esters (5°C), which needs pour point depressant to reduce the pour point, other lubrication properties such as viscosity, viscosity indices and flash point are comparable to commercial industrial oil ISO VG32 and VG46.