Review on Different Sources for the Production of Biodiesel

Abstract— Biodiesel is generally produced from various seed oils such as soybeans, rapeseed and corn. Such a diesel can be used in cars, trucks, busses, construction equipment, in jet engines and in heating and electricity generating systems, but only through blends with maximum blend up to 25% (v/v) Biofuels burn cleaner than fossil fuels. They don’t produce sulphur or aromatics. Main benefit of using biodiesel is that, it reduces nitrogen oxide emissions compared to fossil fuel. This article reviews different sources for the production of biodiesel. Biodiesel is environmentally safer than petro-diesel. It is nontoxic, produces less skin irritation, it degrades four times as fast as petro-diesel, has a flash point significantly higher than that of petro diesel, thus making it safer to store and handle.

Keywords— biodiesel; edible sources; non-edible sources; waste cooking oil; transesterification; review;

I. INTRODUCTION

Biodiesel is used as substitute fuel for diesel engines because it has environmental benefits. Producing biodiesel from waste cooking oil is most easy way and has many environmental benefits. The use of cooking oils produces significant amount of used oils which cause a severe disposal problem. Biodiesel production from waste cooking oil has many advantages because of their low price, availability and less fatty acid content. Used cooking oil is described as a ‘renewable fuel’ as it does not add any extra carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere, as opposed to fossil fuels, which cause changes in the atmosphere. Cooking oil from plant sources is the best source to produce biodiesel because the conversion of pure triglyceride to fatty acid methyl ester is high and the reaction time is short. Biodiesel is commonly produced by transesterification process where waste cooking oil reacts with alcohol and catalyst mixture to produce fatty acid methyl esters and glycerol as a by-product. The cooking oil was first used by Rudolph Diesel for the purpose. He developed the first diesel engine working on peanut oil at the World‘s Exhibition in Paris, 1900 [1]. Until 1920s cooking oils was being used as the energy source in diesel engines. The factors like profitability, availability, low sulphur content, low aromatic content, biodegradability and renewability makes WCO based biodiesel more favourable ov
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