Prospects of bio-based alcohols for Karanja biodiesel production: An optimisation study by Response Surface Methodology

Rapid industrialisation and excessive use of fossil fuel resources has led to growing concern for development of next generation fuel sources. So, the exaggerated to be fulfilled and to curb the problem of increasing fuel prices; researchers are putting their efforts to produce an alternative fuel from replenish-able resources on large scale. Biodiesel is one of the promising biofuels as a replacement to petroleum diesel in future. Transesterification is most adopted technique to produce biodiesel and generally methanol is used as reactant in transesterification. Biodiesel produced by using methanol as alcohols cannot be termed as completely renewable as methanol is derived from fossil resources. To make it completely renewable, alcohol derived from bio-based resources should be adopted. In this paper, an attempt has been made to make use of higher alcohol propanol, butanol and pentanol is used for biodiesel production process and reaction parameter catalyst, time, temperature, molar ratio are optimised with application of Response Surface Methodology (RSM) by using Design Expert software. The result of experimental investigation shows that optimised biodiesel yield was obtained maximum for 1-butanol (76.4%), for 1-pentanol (73.13%) and minimum for 2-propanol (56.86%). The comparative analysis of biodiesel obtained from different alcohols shows that all the resultant biodiesel properties meets the Indian Standard 15607 standard, while the result also indicates that Karanja Oil Pentyl Ester (KOPnE) had superior cold flow properties with viscosity marginally higher among all biodiesels.