Biodiesel production from cooking palm oil in the presence of CaO/γ-Al2O3 catalyst using rotating packed-bed reactor

Abstract

This thesis proposed the biodiesel production from cooking palm oil by using rotating pack bed reactor (RPB). The experiments were divided into 3 parts i) preparation of CaO/γ-Al2O3 catalyst and catalytic activity for the transesterification in a conventional mechanical stirrer reactor (MS). ii) study of CaO/γ-Al2O3 heterogeneous catalysts using RPB iii) study of NaOH homogeneous catalysts using RPB by packing inert packing bed. The Response surface methodology (RSM) based on the Central composite design (CCD) was used to reduce the number of experiments. The optimum condition for CaO /γ-Al2O3 catalyst preparation was at calcination temperature of 500ºC and 24%CaO/γ- Al2O3. 88.56% Fatty acid methyl ester (FAME yield) was obtained at 1.5 h in MS reactor. Moreover, the catalyst can be used repeatedly up to 4th cycle. The used of CaO /γ- Al2O3 in RPB provided a low FAME yield. In addition, inert packing bed in RPB plays an important role in increasing FAME yield obtained from to 72.41 to 86.20% compared to without using inert bed packing in RPB. The highest FAME yields as high as 98.77% was obtained at a methanol-oil molar ratio of 5.68:1, catalyst loading of 1.27%, total flow rate of130 ml/min and rotational speed of 1500 rpm at 60 ºC. In addition, the yield efficiency of biodiesel production in RPB is 25 times higher than that of the MS.