TRANSESTERIFICATION OF RUBBER SEED OIL USING HETEROGENEOUS CATALYST

Biodiesel is a domestically produced and renewable type of fuel that can be
manufactured from edible or non-edible oils. Biodiesel's physical properties are nearly the
same to those of petroleum diesel, but it is a cleaner-burning alternative. Biodiesel consist of
long-chain alkyl esters which is typically made by chemically reacting lipids with an alcohol
producing fatty acid esters.
In this project, biodiesel is produced by transesterification of rubber seed oil using
calcium based catalyst. Catalysts of CaO and CaCO3 is prepared by using calcination and
CaO/ZnO by incipient wetness impregnation method.
For this project, the transesterification reaction of the rubber seed oil was carried out
under the same reaction condition in the presence of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), calcium
oxide (CaO), and mixed calcium oxide (CaO/ZnO) catalyst and the result shows that the
conventional KOH catalyst had better performance than the developed calcium based
catalyst. The biodiesel produced from KOH contain the highest fatty acid methyl ester
content, about 80.02% for biodiesel from rubber seed oil and 77.96% for biodiesel from palm
oil. Among the synthesized catalyst, the mixed calcium oxide catalyst perform better than the
other two catalyst and the CaCO3 catalyst has the lowest performance.