Undergraduate Student

Chemical Engineering Department, Gadjah Mada University

Research title :

Making Activated Carbon as a Material of Solid Catalyst in Biodiesel Production Process.

Research Outline :

Biodiesel is renewable energy that have good potential. In the process, making biodiesel from vegetable oils and alcohol use a  liquid catalyst such as NaOH or KOH. Using catalyst of this type has particularly some weakness such as ; difficult in separation, higly corrosive to process equipment, and produce unfriendly waste. Therefore, it’s necessary to develop the use of solid catalysts in the process of making biodiesel.

As a first step, carried out by making activated carbon from pyrolysis coconut shell and pieces of teak woods as a basic material of solid catalyst. In this research, temperature of pyrolysis is variated from 300^oC to 600^oC with increments 50^oC. Activated carbon produced at each temperature is analyzed with BET surface area analysis. Thereby, the optimum temperature will be obtained which produce the activated carbon surface area that meets the criteria as a catalyst.