Discussion

Biodiesel is an alternative fuel similar to conventional or fossil diesel. Biodiesel can be

produced from straight vegetable oil, animal oil/fats, tallow and waste cooking oil. Todays
experiment, we are prepared biodiesel from vegetable oil and waste vegetable oil. Some of the
most environmentally friendly biodiesel feed stocks are used cooking oil or waste grease.
Vegetables oils, especially palm oil have become more attractive research recently because of
their environmental benefits and the fact that it is made from renewable resources. Palm oils
have the great potential for substitution of the petroleum distillates and petroleum based
petrochemicals in the future. Others vegetable oil fuels are not now petroleum competitive fuels
because they are more expensive than petroleum fuels (Demirbas, 2003).
However, with the recent increase in petroleum prices and the uncertainties concerning
petroleum availability, there is renewed interest in using vegetable oils in diesel engines. The
diesel boiling range material is of particular interest because it has been shown to reduce
particulate emissions significantly relative to petroleum diesel (Giannelos, Zannikos, Stournas,
Lois, and Anastopoulos, 2002). There are more than 350 oil bearing crops identified, among
which only palm oil, sunflower, safflower, soybean, cottonseed, rapeseed and peanut oils are
considered as potential alternative fuels for diesel engines (Geoing, Schwab, Daugherty, Pryde,
and Heakin, 1982).
Eventhough, the vegetable fuel is more expensive than the petroleum fuel. The waste
cooking oil can be used to produce the biodiesel because it is cheap if we compared to unused
vegetable oil. Malaysia as a developing country with a population of 29,179,950 surely have
been used a thousand tons of cooking oil every year. Then our government should start a
campaign to recycle back the waste cooking oil in order to produce biodiesel rather than
discharge it and finally cause environmental pollution (Farha, 2008)
The process used to convert these oils to biodiesel is called transesterification.
Transesterification is a reversible reaction in which one ester is converted into another (as by
interchange of ester groups with an alcohol in the presence of a base). Vegetable oils like animal
fats consist of triglycerides, that is, an ester of the trivalent alcohol glycerol with three fatty acids
each. Replacing the glycerol with methanol transforms the viscons oil into a fuel with excellent
properties that we called biodiesel. In addition to biodiesel, the main product, transesterification
also yields glycerol as a by-product. In other words, we can say that the transesterification
process is the reaction of a triglyceride (fat/oil) with an alcohol to form esters and glycerol. A
triglyceride has a glycerine molecule as its base with three long chain fatty acids attached. The
characteristics of the fat are determined by the nature of the fatty acids attached to the glycerine.
The nature of the fatty acids can in turn affect the characteristics of the biodiesel. During the
esterification process, the triglyceride is reacted with alcohol in the presence of a catalyst,
usually a strong alkaline like sodium hydroxide. The alcohol reacts with the fatty acids to form
the mono-alkyl ester, or biodiesel and crude glycerol. The general reaction of the reaction as
shown below:

In the transesterification reaction, the product of the reaction is influenced to the presence
of free fatty acids. As we know, biodiesel refers to a diesel-equivalent, processed fuel derived
from biological sources (such as vegetable oils), which can be used in unmodified diesel-engined
vehicles. It is thus distinguished from the straight vegetable oils (VO) or waste vegetable oils
(WVO) used as fuels in some modified diesel vehicles. In this experiments, we can say that
waste vegetable oil have longer or higher fatty acids compared to unused vegetable oil due to the
degradation during cooking process. This factor will caused the transesterification reaction
become slow or stop. During the experiment, Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) act as catalyst to
neutralize the fatty acid in the oil. In the experiment, titration by using Sodium Hydroxide
(NaOH) and phenolphthalein as the indicator is used to determine the amount of free fatty acid in
waste vegetable oil (WVO) and vegetable oil (VO). The solution will change color from
colorless into pink that show all the free fatty acid had been neutralized.