Pyrolysis of Vegetable Oil using Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry

The concern about fossil fuel will last and environment issues lead to rapid growth of research and studies about new, renewable and clean source of energy. The most popular alternative energy is biodiesel from vegetable oil. To produce biodiesel, vegetable oil undergoes transesterification process to produce methyl Esther. But, this method has lead to few problems such as the consumption of large amount of alcohol and high viscosity. One way to solve these problems is by pyrolysis of vegetable oil to produce alkenes and other hydrocarbon that have potential to serve as alternative to methyl esters. This study focus on pyrolysis of vegetable oil using pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry technique which the goal is to characterize and quantify the main product generated during pyrolysis. There are several factors and conditions that affect the pyrolysis product and two of the factors which are pyrolysis temperature and pyrolysis time. The effect of temperature and time is varies the amount of the products especially alkenes. With the goal is to get the highest amount of alkenes, Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is being applied to explore the optimum conditions for the pyrolysis. This optimum condition is predicted using quadratic polynomial model. Other than these two variables, another factor that affects the pyrolysis products is the type of vegetable oil than being use as the feedstock. Different vegetable has different composition of fatty acid. It seems that higher content of unsaturated fatty acid will yield more alkenes.