Essay On Transesterification

933 Words4 Pages

INTRODUCTION
E
NERGY act a main role in human life. Today, the energy crisis becomes one of the world issues. Fuels are of great importance because they can be burned to produce certain amounts of energy. More aspects of everyday life rely on fuels, in particular the transport of people and goods. Major energy resources derived from fossil fuels such as petrol, oil, coal and natural gas. Vegetable oils cannot be straightly used in the diesel engine because its possess high viscosity, high density, high flash point and lower heating value. So it needs to be transferred into biodiesel to make it consistent with fuel properties of diesel.

Biodiesel is an alternative diesel fuel prepared from vegetable oil and animal fats. It can act both as a …show more content…

It can also be a treatment of vegetable oil/fat with alcohol to give ester and glycerol. The applicability of transesterification is not restricted to the laboratory. Several relevant industrial processes use this reaction to produce different types of compounds. An example is the making of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) which involves a step where dimethyl terephthalate is transesterified with ethylene glycol in the incidence of zinc acetate as catalyst. Further large number of acrylic acid derivatives are made by transesterification of methyl acrylate with different alcohols, in the presence of acid catalysts.

1.5 Transesterification of Vegetable Oils
In transesterification of vegetable oils, a triglyceride reacts with three molecules of alcohol in the presence of catalyst, generating a mixture of fatty acids alkyl esters and glycerol (Fig. 1).

Oils (triglycerides) + Methanol → Biodiesel + Glycerol

The overall process is a sequence of three following reactions, in
Which die-glycerides and mono-glycerides are made as

More about Essay On Transesterification

Open Document