West Chicken Fat

Esterification of west chicken fat using heterogeneous acidic catalyst toward biodiesel production; application of Sulfonate MWCNT

Ali. Shokuhi Rad*a, Mahtab Hoseini Nia b, H. Nayebzadeh c

[a] Department of Chemical Engineering, Qaemshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemshahr, Iran

[b] Department of Chemical Engineering, Shahrood Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrood, Iran

[c] Department of Chemical Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, IRAN

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Abstract

We used transestrification of Sunflower oil (SFO) and west chicken fat (WCF) toward biodiesel (BD) production. Prior to transestrification

The crude WCF was dried under vacuum to remove any possible water then 100 g WCF mixed with methanol and MWCNT-SO3H was transfer into a 250 ml flat bottom, one neck reactor equipped with a reflux condenser. The reactor was kept in water bath at appropriate temperature. The reaction was carried out without any stirring due to the boiling of methanol. Throughout the reaction, any evaporated methanol was returned to the reactor by the condenser. After the reaction, the mixture was permitted to settle overnight and the top layer (methanol–water) was separated. Filtration was used to remove insoluble catalyst in the mixture. Also the methanol in the lower layer was recovered using rotational evaporator under vacuum at 50

It is well recognized that the FFA level of oil ought to be reduced to less than 1% previous to using the alkaline catalysis [23,24]. We used two acidic catalysts; sulfuric acid as homogeneous catalyst and MWCNT-SO3H as heterogeneous catalyst were used with methanol toward esterification of WCF. Some researchers used two step pretreatment processes to reduce the high level of FFA [25,26]. Based on their work, after the first action, the reaction mixture is permitted to settle. Because of inhabitation property of water toward complete reaction, the methanol and water mixture is separated from the oil phase. Afterward, further methanol and acid catalyst can be added and the reaction continued for the next step. We should note that if the number of pretreatment steps be increased, the ester yield reduces owing to the solubility of ester in methanol [27]. For that reason, in this study, we tried to reduce the FFA level through one step pretreatment to achievement high ester yield and also save the time for producing BD. After each esterification, total WCF was washed twice with hot and distilled water to eliminate any reminded acid in