Interesterification of Vegetable Oils Using Ferric Sulfate: Biodiesel Yield and Cloud Point Analysis.
Annual AIChE Student Conference
2020
2020 Virtual Annual Student Conference
Annual Student Conference
Undergraduate Student Poster Session: Fuels, Petrochemicals, and Energy
Monday, November 16, 2020 - 10:00am to 12:30pm
The goal of this project is to optimize the interesterification of vegetable oils using ferric sulfate as a catalyst and to determine how the conversion and composition of the resulting biodiesels affects the fuelsâ cloud points. Reactions were carried out for 48 hours at 100â with 7.5wt% ferric sulfate and a 20:1 methyl acetate to oil molar ratio using palm, soybean, coconut, canola, rapeseed, and cottonseed oil feedstocks. These oils contain diverse compositions of fatty acids, ranging from short alkyl chain, saturated fatty acids to long chain, unsaturated fatty acids. Generally, biodiesels with high concentrations of short chained FAMEs had low cloud points, while biodiesels with high concentrations of unsaturated FAMEs had the lowest cloud points. Interesterification biodiesel products have lower cloud points than those for transesterification, likely due to the presence of triacetin in the product. These trends can be used to help predict the cloud points of complex biodiesel mixtures and illustrate the benefit of using interesterification for biodiesel conversion.