A low-cost, green,
and highly active catalyst which could transesterify
oil under ambient conditions is required to reduce the biodiesel production
cost. A novel heterogeneous catalyst derived from the waste agroproduct
has been developed from passion fruit peel. The catalytic activity
of calcined waste passion fruit peel (WPFP) which mainly contains
potassium in the form of chloride and carbonate has been evaluated
using factorial design to determine the interaction of molar ratio
of oil to methanol, catalyst weight, and reaction time with three
different reaction conditions such as 65, 45 °C, and room temperature.
The transesterification of palm oil to biodiesel achieved a conversion
of >90% for all variables determined at a reaction temperature
of
45 and 65 °C, respectively, while a maximum biodiesel conversion
of 95.4 ± 2.8% was obtained at room temperature and a reaction
time of 30 min. The addition of certain amounts of the catalyst is
required to reuse the catalyst as the leaching study showed the reduction
of 22% of catalyst weight. The ability of calcined WPFP to catalyze
transesterification at room temperature opens up the possibility to
reduce biodiesel production cost.
Banana peels as agro-waste residues contain potassium oxide as the main component after calcination. The calcined waste banana peels (WBPs) successfully transesterified palm oil to biodiesel at room temperature using a homogenizer.
Utilization of waste spent coffee grounds (SCG) remains limited and requires pre-treatment before being discarded to avoid pollution to the environment. Lipids contained in SCG could be converted to biodiesel through an in situ transesterification method. Current in situ transesterification of wet SCG biomass, conducted at high reaction temperature to reduce the water effect and reduce reaction time, is energy intensive. A new approach, which combines simultaneous extraction-transesterification in a single step using soxhlet apparatus, was developed to produce biodiesel directly from wet SCG biomass. A homogeneous base catalyst at a concentration of 0.75 M showed better catalytic activity than acid, with hexane as a co-solvent on fatty acid (FA) extraction efficiency and FA to fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) conversion efficiency. Studying the factorial effect of ratio of methanol to hexane and reaction time led to the highest FA to FAME conversion efficiency of 97% at a ratio of 1 : 2 and 30 min reaction time. In addition, the catalyst could be used five times without losing its activity. In term of energy consumption, the reactive extraction soxhlet (RES) method could save 38-99% of energy compared to existing methods.
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