Day by day fuel is getting expensive and inflation is hitting new highs across every country across the world. Everyone has started looking for cheap substitutes for every thing in the world. So why should diesel fuel stay behind. Making Biodiesel from waste vegetable oil is an upcoming way of preserving energy and meeting your own requirements without depending on anyone.
Vegetable Oil is commonly available everywhere and there at every home and most households dump the waste oil rather than utilizing that. Making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil is one of the most productive ways to utilize waste vegetable oil.
Biodiesel is a diesel fuel that is made by reacting vegetable oil (cooking oil) with other common chemicals that are easily available in the market. Biodiesel may be used in any diesel automotive engine in its pure form or blended with petroleum-based diesel, so need not worry about anything. No modifications are required, and the result is a less-expensive, renewable, clean-burning fuel.
Making biodiesel with vegetable oil has two different cases one is that with fresh oil and other is with waste oil. Making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil is totally a different case from that of fresh oil.
Waste vegetable oil will have been reheated several times during the course of its usage and therefore needs to be treated differently. The reheating will cause some of the fatty acids bonded to the glycerol to break away and float freely in the vegetable oil hence make them free and then known as Free Fatty Acid (FFA). There are two ways of dealing with free fatty acids and solve the problem –
• Esterify the Free Fatty Acids creating methyl esters then proceeding with the transesterification.
• Increase the amount of catalyst in the single transesterifaction process so that the additional catalyst neutralises the FFAs creating soap as an additional by-product.
In the process waste vegetable oil is made to react with methanol and a catalyst. The catalyst would either Sodium Hydroxide or Potassium Hydroxide. The additional catalyst would react in turn with the free fatty acids and as a result give out soap. Now one has to separate the soap from the biodiesel. After that is done we have to wash the biodiesel fuel and filtrate it to 5 microns through a machine process, which is not feasible by hand. Then the fuel has to be dried again and the biodiesel has to be extracted from it.
If we try to classify the steps we can do it in the following way –
• Filtration of inbound waste oil
• Drying the fuel (i.e. removing water content, especially in the case of used oils)
• Transesterification (specifically, the separation of the methyl esters from the glycerol)
• Settling period
• Separation of the biodiesel fuel from the soap
• Washing the biodiesel fuel
• Filtration to 5 microns
• Drying the fuel again
• Final products of biodiesel fuel and the by-products.
Though over here it may seem as very process, it is not easy, as it seems. But nonetheless one can always try.
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