The extraction of essential oil from lemon-grass was carried out using steam distillation in a locally designed and fabricated pilot plant of 100 kg/day capacity. The extraction pattern and economic analysis of the oil extracted were monitored over time. The extraction revealed that 0.414 litres of oil was produced in a day of five batches with a total production cycle per batch of 1.61 hours. The study further revealed that 94.3% of the oil was extracted in 60 minutes. The GCMS result shows the major components in the extracted Lemon grass oil were Oleic acid, Neral and Citral with percentage composition of 25.69%, 19.32% and 15.38% respectively. These percent compositions compare favourably with literature values. The properties of the Lemon grass oil were found to be: specific gravity, 0.8952; iodine value, 120.7g/g; saponification value, 201.3 mgKOH/g and cetane number, 43.7. The economic analysis on a monthly basis revealed a production cost (direct and indirect) of N160,050.00K and the expected net profit of N378,150.00K.
Bio-lubricant was produced via double transesterification process of Jatropha oil with Ethylene Glycol as a polyol in the presence of potassium hydroxide catalyst. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) using Central Composite Design (CCD) was performed by Design expert v10 software to determine the optimum operating conditions for bio-lubricant Lubricity. In this study, the process variables optimized were temperature, catalyst concentration and reaction time. From the Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA), the most influential parameter on biolubricant production was catalyst concentration. The predicted lubricity was found in good agreement with the experimental value, with coefficient of determination (R 2 ) = 0.9785. The optimum bio-lubricant lubricity of 517.030 was achieved at 2.62 hr reaction time, with 0.95 wt% of catalyst concentration and with temperature of 149.73 o C. Major lubricating properties of the product such as: density at 100 ºC, kinematic viscosity at 40 o C, viscosity at 40ºC, viscosity index, and the pour point were found to be: 0.922mg/l, 5.58 mm 2 /s, 35.8N.s/m 2 , 169 and -7 o C respectively. The bio-lubricant produced is comparable to the standards commercial lubricants ISO VG-46 for light and industrial gears applications.
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