Waste Cooking Oil (WCO) Biodiesel Production Using Calcined Chalk as Heterogeneous Catalyst

Abstract

Biodiesel is a low emission, renewable and a potential alternative of petro diesel made from vegetable oil, waste lipid and animal fat. Transesterification is a very common method to produce biodiesel from raw oil. Other three methods of production of biodiesel are: Direct use and blending of raw oils, micro-emulsion and thermal cracking. The study deals with heterogeneous catalyst based transesterification reaction for conversion of raw WCO into biodiesel. Calcium oxide used as heterogeneous catalyst was prepared from easily available and cheap white chalk (CaCO₃) by the process of calcinations. The heterogeneous catalyst was easily separated from the crude biodiesel produced by transesterification reaction. Further, catalyst separation did not require water washing process during purification process of biodiesel. Biodiesel production was investigated for various factors like methanol to oil molar ratio, reaction time and wt% of catalyst to oil with the help of recycled heterogeneous catalyst. Sustainable yields were obtained when the proposed catalyst was used in mechanical stirring, hydrodynamic cavitation and ultrasonic cavitation methods. The present research has the potential to ease the process of biodiesel production without environmental degradation from low quality feedstocks.