Direct Transesterification of Castor and Jatropha Seeds for FAME Production by Microwave and Ultrasound Radiation Using
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Direct Transesterification of Castor and Jatropha Seeds for FAME Production by Microwave and Ultrasound Radiation Using a SrO Catalyst Miri Koberg & Aharon Gedanken
Published online: 8 May 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract In the present study, we report on an optimized method for fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) production from castor and jatropha seeds. In order to identify the most effective biodiesel production method, we have compared three two-stage methods, each consisting of oil extraction (the first step) and FAME production by transesterification (the second step), with the same three techniques each conducted in one stage, i.e., direct transesterification. The three techniques are conventional heating, sonochemistry, and microwave radiation. The FAME product was analyzed by 1 H NMR spectroscopy and GC-MS. The SrO catalyst was reused successfully, together with seeds containing oil residues, for 10 cycles. The highest yield of FAME, 57.2 % of the total weight of the castor seeds, and a conversion of castor oil to FAME of 99.95 % were achieved in a one-stage method lasting 5 min using microwave radiation as a heat source. Using jatropha seeds leads to a yield of 41.1 % and a 99.7 % conversion of triglyceride to FAME under microwave irradiation in a one-stage method. The direct transesterification by sonication resulted in yields of 48.2 % and 32.9 %, and a 93.6 % conversion from castor and jatropha seeds, respectively. Keywords Biodiesel . Castor seeds . Jatropha seeds . Catalyst . Microwave irradiation
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12155-012-9210-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Koberg : A. Gedanken (*) Department of Chemistry and Kanbar Laboratory for Nanomaterials at the Bar-Ilan University Center for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Biodiesel is an alternative fuel produced by the transesterificaion of oils. The most common way to produce biodiesel is to transesterify triglycerides of vegetable oil with alcohol in the presence of an alkali or acid catalyst [1–3]. Biodiesel, which consists of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), has lower CO and hydrocarbon emissions. In addition, it is nontoxic, biodegradable, and produced from renewable sources and contains insignificant amounts of sulfur [4–6]. In order to optimize and reduce considerably the cost of biodiesel production, several parameters should be taken into consideration. The first parameter refers to a renewable biological source for triglycerides. The most common source for biodiesel production is a vegetable oil such as soybean oil, sunflower, and rapeseed oil. However, vegetable oil refers to edible oils, about which there is concern regarding their use for biofuel production [7]. In order to overcome the problem of using edible oils, there are several nonedible oils extracted from castor and jatropha seeds which could be used as
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