Biodiesel production over CaO supported on silica nanopowder

Abstract

Petroleum reserves are limited; therefore researchers focus their attention on modern renewable technology known as bio-energy conversion. Vegetable oil is one of the biomass resources obtained from plant. Biodiesel, eco-friendly fuel, is manufactured using catalysts. Calcium oxide is a candidate of heterogeneous catalyst from an economical point of view. The purpose of this project is to produce biodiesel via transesterification reaction of soybean oil and methanol using CaO supported on silica nanopowder (snp). The catalysts were calcined at 700oC for 5 hrs. In the present work, the characterization of the prepared catalyst by N2 sorption and XRD were done. All the reactions were performed in batch laboratory scale at 60 o C and for 4 hrs. The reaction conditions were optimized using the CaO/Snp catalyst and by changing the amount of catalyst and the reaction time. The highest biodiesel yield (94.3%) was obtained with 10 wt % of catalyst, 60 wt% loading of active phase and 8 hours reaction time.