Biodiesel Production via Ultrasound assisted Transesterification of Jatropha Oil and Response Surface Methodology for Biodiesel Production

Abstract

Biodiesel is a nontoxic, biodegradable, renewable diesel fuel obtained from vegetable oils and fats. Biodiesel plays an important role in meeting future fuel requirements in view of its ability to reduce emissions from diesel engines for many air pollutant precursors, the lower toxicity of the diesel particulate matter emissions, and its edge over conventional diesel as they are obtained from renewable sources. The most common production process for biodiesel is through the batch transesterification of vegetable oils with alcohol. The main objective of this study to investigate the effect of microwave irradiation and ultrasound on biodiesel production via transesterification from jatropha oil. Compare to homogeneous alkali catalyzed transesterification methods ultrasound and microwave assisted transesterification of vegetable oil gives good results. In this present work influence of various process parameters i.e. reaction time, reaction temperature, oil to methanol molar ratio, amount of catalyst concentration was studied. According to kinetic study of ultrasound assisted transesterification the order of reaction is one and the activation energy required for reaction is 4051.49 cal/ mol. The effect of process parameters in the conventional alkali transesterification reaction of soyabean and the optimum conditions for the Conversion of biodiesel was studied by using design of experiments. In this study, the design of experiment selected was Response Surface Methodology (RSM) coupled with Box Behnken Design (BBD) using the Design-Expert software version 7.1.6. Process parameters selected for optimization were Reaction Temperature (50-70 0C), Reaction time (30-90 min), oil to methanol molar ratio (1:3-1:9) and amount of catalyst concentration (1% - 2%).