Heterogeneous catalyst screening for biodiesel production from Moringa oil

The production of biodiesel as an alternative to fossil fuels has gained world interest nowadays due to global energy crisis and environmental awareness. Biodiesel is the preferred choice because it is environmental friendly as it decreases the possibility of acid rain and greenhouse effect by reducing the emission amount of COx, SOx and hydrocarbons that are incompletely burned during fuel combustion compared to diesel1. The strict regulations made by the environmental protection agency (EPA) to reduce the noxious emissions and the governmental legislations have motivated the biodiesel industry to formulate the new makeup diesel/biodiesel blends (B10 and B20)2. According to research by US Geological Oil and Gas Journal (1995-2000), Malaysia petroleum resources only can last for less than 50 more years3. Despite new oil reservoir discoveries in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Tupi and Guara fields off South-East Brazil, Sudan, the Caspian Sea, Sakhalin, and in the Artic4, fossil fuels is no longer reliable as it is expensive and depleting sources. Biodiesel sources are renewable as it can be produced from vegetable oil, tallow, lard and waste cooking oil5. Vegetable oil can be categorized into two, edible and non-edible. Numerous research of biodiesel has been made using edible feedstock like palm, soybean, and sunflower oils. However, considering that edible vegetable oils are expensive, researchers has prompted to establish a cheap feedstock for biodiesel from non-edible crops. This study reports a catalyst screening process for biodiesel production from Moringa oil via transesterification process using various heterogeneous catalysts with methanol. The reaction condition is fixed throughout the process which are 3wt.% catalyst loading, 9:1 methanol to oil ratio, reaction temperature of 60oC and 60 min reaction duration to determine the best catalyst for the biodiesel conversion from Moringa oil

Utilization of a cost effective Lapindo mud catalyst derived from eruption waste for transesterification of waste oils

The most remarkable property of heterogeneous-catalyzed transesterification is its recyclability which surpass the issue by homogenous catalyst. Lapindo mud (LM), an eruption waste from Indonesia, was treated into an active catalyst for transesterification. LM is reasonably tolerant to FFA, as no visible soap layer was observed during transesterification of high acid value WCO (20.723 mgKOH/g) and POME (120.48 mgKOH/g) with FAME yield of 96.6% and 91.69%, respectively. The reaction conditions obtained for both reaction are mild and comparable to currently reported conditions except LM effectively accelerated the transesterification process of WCO. Reusability test showed that LM exhibited a stable performance with less than 10% declined in FAME after the seventh run with 95% catalyst recovery. Kinetic analysis showed that both WCO and POME transesterification fitted well with Langmuir-Hishelwood first order reaction. The activation energy for WCO and POME transesterification were 55.7 and 59.75 kJ/mol. This findings shows the possibility of LM as a catalyst in general heterogeneous reaction and particularly for transesterification to produce FAME