Soybean oil: Effect Of Methanol to Oil Ratio On Biodiesel Yield and Properties
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2017-02-07
Authors
Arar, Hamzah
Abu Snenih, Jamal
Amireh, Razan
Ghannam, Worood
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Biodiesel production is a very modern and technological area for researchers due to the relevance that it is winning every day, as petroleum keeps increasing in price, also due to environmental advantages. In addition, biodiesel production from waste cooking oils could play an important role, since biodiesel is a biofuel that can be produced from saturated fatty raw material discarded by restaurants, such as oils and fats used for cooking processes especially in the countries that have the dilemma of food vs energy like Palestine.
The main aim of this project is to produce biodiesel from used vegetable oil and to study the effect of methanol to oil molar ratio, and biodiesel blends on viscosity, density, pH and yield% of produced biodiesel, as well testing the best sample on diesel engine.
Biodiesel can be produced using many methods. In this project transesterification method with homogenous alkali catalyst was used according to its availability, simplicity and high reaction time. The feedstock was collected from KFC restaurant in Nablus, methanol was used as a reactant and NaOH as a base catalyst. The study parameters were methanol to oil molar ratio (vary from 4:1, 5:1, 6:1, 8:1) with 1.25% NaOH. All other process parameters (Catalyst concentration, Temperature, stirring time, and mixing speed) were kept at constant value.
From this research, final results in case of the effect of molar ratio of 8:1 and 1.25% NaOH was 9.6 cSt ,the yield of 5:1 and 1.25% NaOH was 92% .Moreover, in case of biodiesel blends it was found blending diesel with biodiesel helps with lowering the viscosity, with the lowest viscosity of 8.5cSt at B2, however, decided that B20M5 have the best results as good stability with little cloud and lowest engine sound as well injected quantity of 5.4 mg/str which is close to diesel quantity of 5 mg/str. Moreover, from the physical properties testing it was noticed also that sample B20,M5 has the lowest viscosity of 8.12cSt with acceptable flash point of 70 °C so it could be considered as the best sample .