Effect of Short Chain Alcohols on Yield of Biodiesel Produced from Pongamia Oil

The crude oil prices in world market is increasing day by day and focus is being shifted to find out substitutes of petroleum diesel and biodiesel has emerged out to be potential alternative fuel. In earlier times, biodiesel was mainly being produced from edible oils but that has led negative impact due to scarcity of food crops in developing nations. So non-edible oils are found to be suitable for biodiesel production and Pongamia oil is selected as it is 2^nd in availability among non-edible oils. Main hindrance towards production of biodiesel is the technologies adopted. Up till now, only methanol and to a lesser extent ethanol has been preferred for transesterification. There is scope of using higher alcohols for production of biodiesel and as n-butanol can be obtained from renewable sources, it also holds good prospect. As per the literature, optimised reaction parameters have been studied and followed for transesterification reactions to reduce the cost of production which includes, 1% Catalyst Concentration of NaOH by weight of oil, 6:1 alcohol to oil molar ratio, 60 °C reaction temperature and 60 minutes reaction time. Yield of biodiesel prepared from different short chain alcohols (methanol, ethanol, 2-propanol and n-butanol) and fuel properties were compared for optimising the selection of alcohol.