Nuri Narulita - Zayda Faizah Zahara

27 Desember 2011

Undergraduate Student,  

Chemical Engineering Department, Gadjah Mada University

Title of Research :

Continuous Production of Biodiesel with Reactive Distillation in Capacity of 150L/ day using Potassium Hydroxide as the Catalyst.

Outline :

Generally, biodiesel is a diesel engine fuel made from renewable materials or specifically a diesel engine fuel consisting of alkyl esters of fatty acids. Biodiesel can be made from vegetable oil, animal oil or from used cooking oil / recycled. Recently, the highly potential of the raw material of biodiesel in Indonesia is the Crude Palm Oil (CPO), where the production of the Palm is very high but few of them used in fuel industry which is against the high demand of fuel in Indonesia.

This research focused in obtaining the biodiesel in capacity of 150L/day with high conversion using Potassium Hydroxide as the catalyst. This process production of biodiesel using Crude Palm Oil as the raw material is done with the transesterification reaction without doing the esterification process at first because the low amount of Free Fatty Acid in the raw material. To reach the high conversion, therefore several of variation is done. The variation consist of residence time which is from 0 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes, the operation temperature are 55^oC, 60^oC, and 65^oC, mol ratio of methanol : oil are 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, and 1:5, and concentration of catalyst are 0,5%, 1%, 1,5% and 2%. This research is expected to meet the needs of biodiesel in Indonesia as an environmentally friendly fuel.