Biodiesel Production From Rubber Seed Oil

Abstract

World's energy crisis, global warming, diminishing fossil fuel reserves are raising concerns and inevitability to find more economic and more environmentally friendly solutions to satisfy the current energy consumption. The results of various researchers support the use of biodiesel as a viable alternative to conventional petroleum fuel. However, biodiesel production from refined edible oil types such as sunflower, soybean or palm oil causes the risk of competition with food and land that increases the overall production cost of the biodiesel which is not economical. Hence, it is better to use the non-edible types of oil for biodiesel production. The aim of this paper is to study the suitability of locally available rubber seed oil in Vietnam as substitutes to conventional diesel fuel in diesel engines. The significant properties of rubber seed oil include oil content, water content, acid value, density, viscosity which are found out during this investigation. Rubber seed oil possesses a very high free fatty acid (FFAs),which results in developing a two-step transesterification method to produce biodiesel from rubber seed oil: (1) acid catalyzed esterification reduces the FFA content of the oil to less than 2%;(2) alkaline catalyzed transesterification process converts the products of the first step to its mono-esters and glycerol