Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Zahra Abbasi ¹
• Elisa I. Garcia-Lopez ²
• Giuseppe Marcì ³
• Mehdi Ahmadi ^{4, 5}

¹ Faculty of Science, Ayatollah Boroujerdi University, Lorestan, Iran

² Department of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies (STEBICEF), University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy

³ “Schiavello-Grillone” Photocatalysis Group, Department of Engineering, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy

⁴ Environmental Technologies Research Center, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran

⁵ Department of Environmental Health Engineering, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran

Abstract

Diesel fuel can be substituted with biodiesel fuel. Burning biodiesel results in less pollution because its source is vegetable or animal fat. Waste cooking oil (WCO) was utilized in this study as a raw source to produce biodiesel. In the WCO under study, the percentage of free fatty acids (FFAs) was 4.09%. The process of turning used cooking oil waste into biodiesel involved two steps. The initial phase was studying the photocatalytic esterification of methanol with FFAs in WCO under visible irradiation using Cr (x%)-TiO2. Triglycerides and methanol were transesterified in the second stage, which was catalyzed by NaOH. When TiO2 was present, efficiency was shown to increase by 10% when compared to the absence of a photocatalyst. Cr-TiO2 photo-esterification reaction has an equivalent order of one. The realisation of the reaction under mild conditions was confirmed by the activation energy of 31.36 kJ/mol needed for the Cr-TiO2 photocatalyst to photo-esterify WCO. Our hypothesis for the esterification process took into account the formation of H+, CH3OO·, and R-COOH on the photocatalyst surface. OH- was thought to be the active species in the transesterification reaction process. The density of the produced biodiesel was 0.89 g.cm-3, per the data that were obtained. For biodiesel, the results yield a falling point of -5 and a cloud point of 0, respectively. The biodiesel made from waste oil had a viscosity of 4.1 mm2.s−1, which was within the standard range. The biodiesel sample made from waste oil has an acid value of 0.38 mg KOH

Graphical Abstract

Keywords

• Biodiesel
• Two dimensional
• Photocatalyst
• Waste Oil
• Kinetics
• Esterification

Main Subjects

• Catalyst design

OPEN ACCESS

©2024 The author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

PUBLISHER NOTE

Sami Publishing Company remains neutral concerning jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

CURRENT PUBLISHER

Sami Publishing Company