Abstract
Biodiesel is a renewable fuel obtained from biological raw materials as vegetable oils, sugars, micro algae and bacteria among them. Particularly, biodiesel based in virgin materials, such as palm oil and produced via alkali transterification, have become an industrial standard for large scale facilities. However, the cost associated to virgin raw materials constitutes a huge percentage of production costs, and in addition to low petroleum prices, there is a need to reduce production cost without need to make important modifications in both, the plant infrastructure and processing parameters. Therefore, this work is focused in the evaluation of quality of biodiesel obtained from mixtures of palm oil and Waste Frying Oil (WFO) at low proportions. The conditions employed for the synthesis were: alkali transterification (1% w/w KOH) catalyst, molar ratio methanol/mixed oil 6:1 at 65 °C was developed. The best obtained yield was 98.69% and conversion of 95.53% for 5% WFO and 95% palm oil. Results reveal that a high amount of methyl esters and physicochemical properties evaluated under ASTM, NTC and EN standards, are comparable with Biodiesel from virgin palm oil. Also, the study demonstrates that it is possible to use WFO at low proportions with palm oil without an appreciable change in this properties compared with biodiesel from pure virgin oil. As a general estimation, potential savings could be of 3.2% in production cost.
