(487p) Biodiesel Production From Acid Oil (Dark Oil) Containing High Free Fatty Acid Via Solid Acid Catalyst

Recently, many countries have reported rapid progress in renewable fuels, with biodiesel being the most well known. Biodiesel obtained from vegetable oil (VOs) has attracted considerable attention over recent decades as a renewable, biodegradable, eco-friendly and non-toxic fuel, and several processes have been developed for its production. As the consumption of petroleum continues to increase, so does the associated air pollution and accelerated rate of global warming due to the increase of atmospheric CO2. If biodiesel was used as an alternative fuel, the production of CO2 would not increase, as the CO2 emitted from biodiesel would be recovered during the production of biomass. The high cost of feedstock for biodiesel production still the biggest problem to be resolved for more proliferated use of it. Therefore, many research group have been studied for biodiesel production system using cheaper feedstocks.

Acid oil (dark oil) have been produced from Soapstock (SS) in industrial production. A price of the dark oil is cheaper than other material. So, it is the most promising candidate for industrial biodiesel process. The dark oil contained 54.9% FFA, 42.6% Fatty matter, 1.4% moisture content and other inert materials.

Biodiesel is generally produced by the esterification of Free Fatty Acid to fatty acid methyl esters with methanol using homogeneous acid catalyst. In this work, we tried to convert FFA using heterogeneous acid catalysts to fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), which are the components of biodiesel themselves. The activities of several heterogeneous catalysts were tested on the conversion of FFA, with the tungsten oxide zirconia, sulfated zirconia and sulfated alumina catalyst being selected. A series of experiments were performed using the catalysts with temperature, catalyst loading, and reaction time used as parameters to determine the optimal conditions. The characterization of catalysts was performed by BET, TPD and XRD analysis.