SOLAR ASSISTED BIODIESEL PRODUCTION FROM SESAME OIL

Abstract

The depletion of exhaustible resources such as fossil fuels, alternative energy sources are more focussed now-as-days. Biodiesel, being a source of clean energy can be a good alternative to prevent the depletion of petro-fuels as it is produced from edible and non-edible oils which renewable and non-toxic in nature. Transesterification is the only process for synthesis of biodiesel. This process involves, heating of triglyceride with methanol in the presence of catalyst like KOH. In this project, biodiesel was produced from sesame oil by using solar technology. The conversion yield was maximized using Response Surface Method and Taguchi’s method of optimization. This method was adequate for calculating the effect of control parameters as well as it optimizes the experiment with finite number of runs. Comparison and cost analysis by various methods including parabolic dish type collector, box type solar cooker and mechanical method for making biodiesel is done in this project. At the end, results were compared for mechanical method as well as solar assisted method of biodiesel production. It was concluded that the quality and conversion yield of biodiesel produced from solar assisted method is better even when there is no requirement of mechanical stirring in this method.