Acetone and Diethyl ether: Improve cold flow properties of Dairy Washed Milkscum biodiesel

The trend in utilizing biological industrial wastes to produce biofuels has been increasingly popular over the past decades. The dairy washed milk scum (DWMS) is one of such potential industrial waste, which can be used as feedstock for the production of biodiesel. One of the inherent problems of DWMS biodiesel is its poor low temperature properties. In this investigation, the influence of two solvents namely, Acetone (ACE) and Diethyl ether (DEE) was tested as cold flow improvers (CFI's) on low temperature properties of DWMS biodiesel. It was observed that the addition of 20% (v/v) of ACE and DEE to DWMS biodiesel improved the low temperature properties. The crystallization characteristics of biodiesel and its blends with CFIs were determined using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Other fuel properties were within the permissible limits of biodiesel standard (ASTM D6751-15C) with all the blends of ACE and DEE.