Optimization of palm methyl ester and its effect on fatty acid compositions and cetane number

This paper proposes the Taguchi based optimization technique for the production of biodiesel from palm oil. For this purpose, L9 orthogonal array was successfully used for better yield estimation by using Minitab-18 software. Different process variables like molar ratio, catalyst concentration, reaction time and reaction temperature were studied. A predicted yield of 92.06 % was achieved by regression analysis by maintaining the process variables of molar ratio 5:1 (methanol to oil), 4 grams of catalyst concentration (NaOH), 180 minutes of reaction time and 44°C of reaction temperature. Experimentations were conducted on the same process variables and achieved a yield of 91.65 %. By this it is clear that both experimentation and regression analysis by Taguchi are in good agreement with an error of 0.41 % which may be acclaimed as experimental error. The fatty acid compositions (FAC) were also analyzed and it is found that 37.12 % saturated and 62.88 % unsaturated fatty acids present in the palm methyl ester (PME). By using the FAC of PME the Cetane number was predicted as 55.38. The predicted Cetane number from FAC tally with experimental Cetane number. The PME is characterized for different fuel properties by following the international standards. And it is concluded that catalyst concentration and reaction temperature are the important parameters which influence PME yield, Taguchi based optimization technique will helps in predicting the maximum yield with minimum number of experiments.