Abstract
Abstract. The use of ethanol and biodiesel, which are alternative fuels or biofuels, has increased in the last few years. Modern official standards list 25 parameters that must be determined to certify biodiesel quality. In order to determine biofuel quality, several methods were already widely used in which most of them were based on solvent extraction followed by other laboratory procedures. Yet, these methods are expensive, laborious and complicated processing for samples. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) can be considered as a fast, pollution-free and non-destructive method in determining biofuel quality parameters. The objective of this study is to apply near infrared technology in classifying biodiesel based on KOH (0.3, 0.5 and 0.7) and to predict related biodiesel quality properties (water content, linolenic fatty acid, oleic acid, and stearic acid) based on its infrared reflectance. Biodiesel infrared spectrum was acquired in wavelength range from 1000 to 2500 nm for different mentioned three KOH content. Principal component analysis (PCA) with non-iterative partial least square (NIPALS) was applied to analyze biodiesel spectral data. The result showed that two principal components (PC1=97% ad PC2 = 2%) based on infrared reflectance data were successfully able to recognize and classify biodiesel based on their used KOH. Moreover, the wavelength range of 1000 – 1140 were to be believed related to linolenic fatty acid whilst 1450 nm and 1930 nm were associated with water content. Stearic acid can be predicted in wavelength range of 1330 – 1380 nm and wavelength range of 1725 – 1790 nm were related to oleic acid of biodiesel. This may conclude that infrared technology was feasible to use as a rapid, effective and non-invasive method in biofuel classification and evaluation.
Highlights
Increased industrialization and motorization are the major cause of environmental pollution and diminishing petroleum reserves
The main objective of this present study is to apply Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) technique combined with Principal component analysis (PCA) for rapid biodiesel classification based on KOH concentration
The NIR spectrum indicates the presence of organic materials as derived from the bands that result from the interaction of molecular bonds of O-H, C-H, C-O and N-H with the incident radiation
Summary
Increased industrialization and motorization are the major cause of environmental pollution and diminishing petroleum reserves These concerns are leading energy policies to promote research in the field of new alternative fuels. Biodiesel is a fuel produced mainly through trans-esterification of fatty acids from vegetable oils or animal fats with an alcohol (mainly methanol) to produce an ester and a byproduct, glycerol (Baptista et al, 2008, Siregar et al, 2013; Siregar et al, 2015). This reaction occurs stepwise, with mono and diglycerides as intermediate products. Biodiesel allows the reduction of greenhouse gases, particle matter and sulphur emissions (Pinzi et al, 2009; Lima et al, 2003)
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