(297e) Synthesis of BDF From Sunflower Oil and Waste Cooking Oil Under Reflux Condition with CaO

In recent years, biodiesel fuel(BDF) is very attractive biofuel since it has lots of beneficial for environmental protection and reducing the consumption of fossil resources. It is produced by transesterification of triglycerides in the vegetable oils and animal fats with excess of methanol. Therefore, it could reduce the greenhouse emissions, SOx and hydrocarbons and free from aromatic compounds and it is used as alternative petroleum-derived diesel because of similar combustion propertiescompare with that. Nowadays, BDF is synthesized by trasesterification reaction with homogeneous catalyst such as methanol solution of alkali hydroxide and acidic catalyst.

While homogeneous catalyst has lots of problems such as equipment corrosion, the large amount of waste water, soap formation reducing the yield of BDF and high production cost, heterogeneous catalysts have a lot of environmentally and economically benefits such as noncorrosive to the reactor, fewer disposal problem, easy to separate from the BDF products and designed to give higher activity, selectivity and longer catalyst lifetimes. There are many kind of solid catalyst for trasesterification catalyst, such as a) supported alkali, b) alkaline earth oxides and supported alkaline earth oxide, c) metal oxides and metal complex, d) hydrotalcite catalyst, e) acid solid catalyst, f) heterogeneous resin catalyst et al..

In this study, transesterification of sunflower oil and waste cooking oil with methanol to produce BDF using CaO as solid catalysts were investigated at high temperature. It is found that CaO shows high catalytic properties for the transesterification reaction. The fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) yield reached 98.3% when the transesterification was performed with a catalyst concentration of 5 wt% at 120^OC for 45 min. The yield of transesterification of sunflower oil shows the higher than that of waste cooking oil.