Abstract
The commercial process of heterogeneously catalyzed biodiesel production process is in its final steps due to its advantages over the old homogeneously catalyzed one, and in order to provide an economic and fast way to investigate the vegetable oil conversion into biodiesel, a relation between conversion and a parameter that can be easily measured like viscosity is developed in this paper. The variation of viscosity with increasing conversion was proved to be exponential.an equation was developed to predict conversion from dynamic viscosity values based on the experimental data. A conversion of 91% was obtained at 60 oC reaction temperature, 12:1 methanol to oil molar ratio, 600 rpm in 2 hours of reaction time. The method reported in this paper is meant to save time and money since the most widely used chromatography methods are expensive and time consuming.
Highlights
The continuously rising energy demands and the limited fossil fuel resources have driven the researchers around the world toward the investigation and development of alternative fuels of renewable resources
Biodiesel is the term used to refer to a blend of fatty acid methyl esters with significantly lower exhaust emissions than its rival petro-diesel [1]
Calcium oxide has been reported as a cheap and effective catalyst for the transesterification process of low free fatty acids oils, its resources basically consists of calcium hydroxide or calcium carbonate that can be calcined at different temperatures to obtain calcium oxide of specific propertiesDepending on calcination temperature and time, CaO was categorized as a solid basic catalyst with decent reusability with or without regeneration depending on its origin [13,14,15,16]
Summary
The continuously rising energy demands and the limited fossil fuel resources have driven the researchers around the world toward the investigation and development of alternative fuels of renewable resources. Biodiesel has some notable properties that attracted the attention to it as a promising alternative to petro-diesel like its biodegradability, low toxic emissions especially CO2 gas, decent properties of storage and transportation and the fact that it’s derived from renewable resources [2]. Biodiesel is derived from vegetable oils by esterification or transesterification of vegetables oils and animals fats[3].during the previous years the dominant process for biodiesel production was homogeneously catalyzed using mainly potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide for transesterification and sulfuric acid for esterification, primary alcohols are used to react with oils in both esterification and transesterification processes(mainly methanol for its favorable properties and low price)[4,5,6].the homogeneously catalyzed process has proven its acceptance, it comes with its disadvantages like catalysts corrosiveness, soap formation, glycerol phase contamination with catalyst, requirement of large amount of water for biodiesel washing and requirement of energy for biodiesel drying which makes this process time and labor consuming [7,8,9,10].
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