THE KINETICS OF BIODIESEL PRODUCTION FROM WASTE COOKING OIL

ABSTRACT This study here investigated temperature as one of the factors that might affect the transesterification of waste vegetable oil (WVO) to biodiesel. The waste vegetable oil was esterified in a 1000ml round flask place on a constant temperature magnetic stirrer for 60minutes. The esterified oil was transesterified with methanolic NaOH (1.0wt%) at 6:1 mole ratio in the round bottom flask fitted with a condenser on the magnetic stirrer at 350rpm at temperatures between 30oC to 60oC for variable times. Results obtained revealed that conversion increased correspondingly with increase in temperature with peak value obtained at 60oC with a yield of 94.81% under optimal conditions of all other reaction variables. Increasing the temperature beyond 60°C resulted in a decrease in the production yield. With the reacting molecules colliding faster with increase in temperature, the activation energy (Ea) which is the minimum amount of energy required by the reacting molecules to initiate a reaction was estimated to be 68948.002J/mole with rate constant at optimum yield of biodiesel production of k = 0.0333min-1 at a frequency k of 2.97 min 1and temperature 333K .