Production of biodiesel from rubber seed oil by transesterification method using alumina-supported potassium iodide catalyst / Nor Hayati Ad Rahman

Nowadays, biodiesel has been identified as a good complement and possible
substitution of fossil diesel because of the encouraging similar characteristic to
fossil diesel in addition to its good lubricity, biodegradability, non-toxicity and
environmentally when used in diesel engines. The main objective of this research
is to build non hazardous environmentally process for the production of biodiesel.
The transesterification reaction is one of the method to produce the biodiesel. In
this research, alumina supported potassium iodide (Kl / Al203) was act as catalyst
and rubber seed oil is used as a sample to produce the biodiesel using the method
of transesterification. The experimental result shows the heterogenous catalyst
that calcined at 773K showed better catalytic activity in the transesterification of
rubber seed oil which provided the maximum yield of 31.8% at molar ratio of
methanol to oil 15:1, amount of catalyst is 2 g at temperature 60°C in reaction
time of 8 hours. The result for GC-MS analysis for the confirmation compound
that obtained were the fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) only contains in the sample
ratio 15:1 that is stearic acid and palmitic acid. For FTIR result, the peak
approximately 3428.65 cm-I have the intensive broad vibration bands in the region
3400-3480 em-I in both samples are attributed to OH-groups directly attached to
the alumina and the peak bending mode of~OH group at around 1618.72 em-I.