Synthesis of Biodiesel from Waste Cooking Oil by Alkali Doped Calcinated Waste Egg Shell Powder Catalyst and Optimization of Process Parameters to Improve Biodiesel Conversion 2020-01-0341

Our present work concentrates on the preparation of low-cost heterogeneous catalyst from egg shell, for the waste cooking oil biodiesel production, optimization and evaluation of its impact on a compressed ignition engine. The egg shell catalyst was prepared by calcination at the temperature range of 300-900°Cand categorized using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDAX) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). The transesterification process was catalysed by calcinated egg shell catalyst and the biodiesel yield percentage was optimized by varying the parameters such as reaction temperature, time, catalyst weight, and methanol to oil molar ratio. The L9 orthogonal array was selected for the Taguchi optimization. Among the selected parameters temperature and methanol to oil ratio were found to be maximum influencing parameters. The maximum biodiesel yield% was 94.3 and this was obtained at the temperature of 60 ºC, 6wt% catalyst weight%, 4 hr time and 12:1 methanol to oil ratio levels. The egg shell catalyst calcinated at 900ºC has shown good regeneration capacity. The biodiesel % yield was 76% even after the five transesterification cycles. This is additional advantage of the egg shell heterogeneous catalyst from the commercialization point of view. Five different test fuels were prepared and used to operate the diesel engine namely WCOB20 (Waste Cooking oil biodiesel blend 20), WCOB30, WCOB40, WCOB50 and WCOB 100. The blend WCOB20 has resulted in better brake thermal efficiency and fuel consumption than the other test fuels.