Experimental and kinetic study of free fatty acid esterification derived from Ceiba pentandra seed oil with ethanol

Abstract

Indonesia has an abundant feedstock of Ceiba Pentandra which is very potential as a source for biodiesel production. However, it contains very high free fatty acid and can not be directly converted into biodiesel through transesterification process. One of the solution is by reacting Ceiba pentandra oil with ethanol under acid catalyst called esterification process. In this study, the operating conditions used for esterification reaction was Ceiba pentandra oil to methanol molar ratio of 1:12; with reaction time of 120 minutes. The reaction temperature was varied into 40°C, 50°C, 60°C and 70°C. The results show that, highest conversion achieved was 93.5% at reaction temperature of 70°C. Based on the experimental data, pseudo-Homogeneous model was used to model the kinetic of esterification reaction. Based on this model, the activation energy was 21.319kJ/mol and the kinetic factor was 14,264.08/minutes with R2 of 0.9675 and SSE of 0.0004.