Upgradation of waste cooking oil to biodiesel in the presence of green catalyst derived from date seeds

Abstract

The present work reports a valorization of waste cooking oil (WCO) conversion to biodiesel in the presence of carbon catalyst derived from waste date seeds. The leftover carbon material is treated to remove impurities and modified further by impregnating KOH, and is then used for biodiesel production. The optimization of the complete biodiesel production process was carried out considering the operating parameters reaction temperature (°C), retention time (min), catalyst composition/amount and methanol:WCO ratio. Three types of catalysts were prepared to predict the best composition of green catalysts derived from waste date seeds. Within the limit of set constraints, the maximum biodiesel yield obtained from WCO by a transesterification process was 93%. This high product conversion was achieved at an operating reaction temperature of 65 °C, using synthesized green catalyst type II with 3 wt% KOH on carbon, with a retention time of 90 min and a methanol:WCO ratio of 10:1. The synthesized biodiesel was characterized to evaluate and report its quality in line with international American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and European Norms (EN) standards. The results show that the demonstrated work successfully produced biodiesel with high yield and within set safe standard quality limits.

Keywords:

• Biodiesel
• green catalyst
• waste date seeds
• waste cooking oil (WCO)
• transesterification

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, for financial support through the Seed Project (1602040620-P).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.