Studies On Biodiesel Production Using Acid Catalyst And Bio-Catalyst

Abstract

Various environmental negative effects reflected in an increase in air pollution, global warming, climate change, acid rain and ozone layer depletion among others have motivated researchers, scientists together with industry and government partnerships to search, develop and find alternatives and solutions to reduce adverse impacts in the short, middle and long term. Among the different choices in place, important efforts are aimed at finding feasible alternative fuels (biofuels) for transportation that could replace traditional fossil fuels. Biofuels are referred to as liquid or gaseous fuels for transportation sector that are predominantly produced from biomass. Among the different possible sources, biodiesel, an alternative diesel fuel is derived from vegetable oil, animal fats, or waste vegetable oils, is obtained by reacting the oil or fat with an alcohol (i.e. methanol) in the presence of a catalyst(here acid or bio catalyst) to give the corresponding mono alkyl esters. Biodiesel is a renewable replacement to petroleum based diesel. The production of biodiesel by transesterification process employing alkali catalyst has been industrially accepted for its high conversion and reaction rates. Recently, acidic and enzymatic (bio-catalyst) transesterification has attracted much attention for biodiesel production as it produces high purity product and uses various feed stocks. The present work includes transesterification via catalytic route which is better option among all the routes. Here the raw materials used are jatropha oil and methanol as an alcohol in the reaction. The catalyst used is H2SO4 as an acid catalyst and lipase from pseudomonas sp. as biocatalyst. The main focus is on production of biodiesel at the laboratory scale. The influence of temperature, catalyst quantity, methanol to oil ratio and reaction time is studied. In this work the quality check of biodiesel produced is covered. The results of the work done shows that 5% acid catalyst, 5 hr reaction time, 6:1 methanol to oil ratio, 60o C and 600 rpm is optimum parameters for reaching higher conversion of jatropha oil to biodiesel. The kinetics study shown that the order of reaction is one for acid catalyzed reaction. The results for quality check shows that the properties of blend (B20) and biodiesel (B100) meet the standards.