Produção de Biodiesel a partir de diferentes fontes de óleos

Abstract

The search for renewable energy sources has helped to develop technologies that can be more friendly to the environment, mainly by reducing the use of fossil fuels. Hence the advent of the expansion of the use of biofuels, with emphasis on biodiesel, which appears as an increase and possible future substitute for mineral diesel. For the production of biodiesel, the main raw material is a lipid source, mainly from vegetable oils and animal fat. However, with the relatively high cost of these materials, the use of residual oils has been increasingly studied as a cheaper alternative to the biodiesel production process, in addition to give a new destination to a highly polluting material. The most used process in the production of biodiesel is transesterification, with emphasis on the reaction conducted in an alkaline environment, where the fatty material reacts with an alcohol, usually methanol or ethanol, in the presence of a basic catalyst, commonly potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide, generating biodiesel and using glycerin as a by-product. In this work, soybean, coconut, cotton, corn and residual frying soybean oil were used, where ethanol was the reaction alcohol and the process was catalyzed by NaOH. The ethanolysis of these oils was carried out with a molar ratio (MR) of ethanol:oil of 9: 1, with a reaction time of 1 hour and 30 minutes, by means of mechanical stirring of 200 rpm, under temperatures of 30 ° C and 40 ° C. All tests used 10 g of the oil under study and 1% by the oil weight of the base catalyst, with the amount of alcohol being defined by the pre-established molar ratio. For all oils, the best results were obtained at a temperature of 30 ° C, with emphasis on soybean oil and mainly on corn oil, which yielded 88.18%. The residual frying oil also presented a satisfactory yield of 75.26%, which helps to show that it can be a viable production process, mainly with the use of more advanced reaction techniques.