Biodiesel Production from Castor Oil in the Presence of Lipase/calcium alginate Biocatalyst; Optimizing and Evaluation of Temperature, Catalyst Amount, and Methanol to Oil Ratio Effects
Subject Areas :
Arash Davoodimehr
1
,
Alireza Shakeri
2
,
Mohammad Barati
3
1 - University of Tehran, Faculty of Chemistry
2 - University of Tehran, Faculty of Chemistry
3 - University of Kashan
Keywords: Biodiesel, Process optimization, Lipase, Biocatalyst, Castor oil,
Abstract :
In this study, biodiesel was produced from castor oil in the presence of lipase/calcium alginate biocatalyst. Porcine pancreatic lipase was immobilized on calcium alginate and used in the esterification of castor oil to fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs). The synthesized calcium alginate was characterized using FTIR, FESEM and BET analysis. Also, after lipase immobilization, the protein content of the synthesized bio-catalyst, as well as the hydrolysis activity and the activity esterification activity were evaluated. In order to optimize the reaction of biodiesel production, the design of the experiment was carried out in SAS JMP Pro software. For this purpose, three factors of reaction temperature, amount of catalyst and ratio of methanol to oil were considered and data analysis was done using RSM. The results showed that the highest biodiesel yield (86.96%) is obtained at a temperature of 48.2oC, the amount of catalyst is 0.32 g, and the ratio of methanol to oil is 0.50. It was also found that high amounts of each of these factors have negative effect on the efficiency of biodiesel production, which is due to the inherent characteristics of the enzyme, including inactivation at higher temperatures and high methanol amounts, as well as coagulation and conformational changes in the high catalyst concentrations.
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