Abstract
Biodiesel has its unique position in the field of renewable energy as alternate fuel to diesel due to fuel price, energy requirement and petroleum crisis. In this study, biodiesel was produced from Waste Cooking Oil (WCO) using Copper doped Zinc Oxide (CZO) nanocatalysts. The synthesized Copper doped Zinc Oxide nanocatalysts were characterized by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope (HRTEM). Design of experiment was framed using Taguchi method to limit the experiments and to find the optimum reaction conditions. The effect of process parameters such as oil-to-methanol ratio (O/M), catalyst type, catalyst concentration, temperature and time on the transesterification reactions using characterized Copper doped Zinc Oxide nanocatalyst were investigated. The 4% (weight /weight) nanocatalyst concentration, 1:5 Oil to methanol molar ratio at 60°C temperature and 40 minutes of reaction time were found to be optimum, in which the maximum biodiesel yield of 98 % (w/w) was obtained. Hence it was determined that nanocatalysts exhibited good catalytic activities on biodiesel production from Waste Cooking Oil (WCO).
Highlights
Fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal and natural gas are the major sources of increased pollution level
Biodiesel is commonly produced by transesterification of lipids, animal fats, grease and waste cooking oils [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13].Catalyst plays an important role in transesterification reactions
This research work aims at conversion of Waste Cooking Oil (WCO) into biodiesel using the transesterification process with Copper doped Zinc Oxide (CZO) nanocomposite as heterogeneous catalysts
Summary
Fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal and natural gas are the major sources of increased pollution level. Homogeneous catalysts result in the formation of soap which makes more complication in the reaction and in the product separation. Heterogeneous catalysts has its own benefits such as ease of separation, easy recovery and can potentially be re-used. All these benefits leads to a reduced production cost [1, 2, 3, 6]. This research work aims at conversion of WCO into biodiesel using the transesterification process with CZO nanocomposite as heterogeneous catalysts. Since nano particles have a large surface-to-volume ratio compared to bulk materials, they are attractive to use as catalysts for the transesterification reactions
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