CO2 emissions reduction through catalytic production & use of fuels derived from biomass
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This study focused on the preparation of environmentally friendly heterogenous catalyst from biomass specifically waste egg shells, cow bones and fish scales for use in the production of biodiesel from waste cooking oil (WCO) which is also a biomass-based waste feedstock collected from households that will be an alternative fuel source and contribute to reducing CO2 emissions into the environment as well as the cost of biodiesel production To begin, the biodiesel feedstock properties needed to be checked for its suitability in making fuel because the feedstock properties were going to impart the properties of biodiesel. The first property of the oil checked was the fatty acid composition. The need for a further purification step apart from filtration was confirmed and other properties of the feedstock such as viscosity, density, acid value and water content of the WCO were also checked. Based on these, the WCO fell in the range within which it could be used in making biodiesel, there was no need for further physical purification steps because the properties of both the crude and purified WCO were very close. In addition, the properties showed that a catalyst basic in nature was suitable for the transesterification process. The next phase involved carrying out reactions with the conventional basic catalyst (KOH) to serve as a baseline for the work to which heterogenous catalytic reactions would be compared. The heterogenous catalysts were then synthesized from waste egg shells (ES), cow bones (CB) and fish scales (FS) separately before bi-blend (CBES, FSCB, FSES) and tri-blend mixtures (M3) of these components were made in a ratio of 1:1 and 1:1:1 respectively and characterized. The focus of the catalyst was on the performance of M3 and how CB, FS and ES contributed to that as well as its performance in comparison to biii blend mixtures that have been the kind of blends prepared in literature for biodiesel catalysts. All seven heterogenous catalysts were utilized in transesterification reaction of the WCO at the same process conditions to evaluate their performance with respect to biodiesel yield. The biodiesel yield of these catalysts followed a trend of decreasing order as follows: M3 > FSES > CBES > ES > FSCB > FS >CB mainly due to the basicity resulting from the type of active components present in these catalysts. Regression analysis was performed to further validate which characteristics affected the performance and it was confirmed that the most important characteristic of the catalysts in this work was basicity. Furthermore, since M3 was the focus and the best performing catalyst amongst the heterogenous catalysts as well, it was compared to the yield of the homogenous reactions that was used as the baseline and a difference of averagely 27% was observed. M3 was then used in reactions to study the effect of the process variables on the biodiesel yield and the optimum conditions were found to be a temperature of 60°C, 6 hours of reaction time, stirring speed of 600 rpm, ethanol-to-oil molar ratio of 15:1 and catalyst concentration of 2wt% of the oil.