Studies on acid value reduction of neem seed oil and biodiesel production

4^th International Conference on Bioprocess and Bio Therapeutics

October 20-21, 2016 Houston, USA

Kifayat Ullah and Sofia

COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan
Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Bioproces Biotechniq

Abstract :

Biodiesel produced from a wide variety of vegetable oils is expected to replace diesel fuel. Conventional biodiesel production method from edible or non-edible type oils is alkaline transesterification. The conflict between food and fuel led to identify more than fifty non-edible oil sources for biodiesel production. Neem seed oil, one of the easily available non-edible oils, had undergone two step acid esterification processes to reduce the high free fatty acid (FFA) content from 23.08% to 0.53%. Acid esterification was carried out by 50% (v/v) methanol with 1% (v/v) sulphuric acid (H2SO4) as the acid catalyst at a temperature of 45�±5�°C in 1 hour reaction time. The oil separated from the first step was subsequently treated in the second step by 30% (v/v) methanol and 1% (v/v) H2SO4 with 1 hour reaction time, at the same temperature. The acid esterified oil was subjected to alkaline transesterification with 1:9 molar ratio of oil to methanol and 1.5 % (w/w) potassium hydroxide as the base catalyst at a temperature of 50�±3�°C with 40 minutes reaction time. The result obtained shows better biodiesel yield compared with many studies in literature.

Biography :

Email: kifayat.dawar@comsats.edu.pk