Biofuel Production from Sunflower Oil and Determination of Fuel Properties

Abstract

The depletion of crude oil is central to the debate on energy, and thesubject becomes even more pressing because of the rapid industrial development ofemerging countries that hangs over demand. Growing emissions of combustiongenerated pollutants, and their increasing costs will make biomass sources moreattractive. Currently, biodiesel is becoming popular as a more environment-friendlyfuel, because it is a renewable, domestic resource with an environment-friendlyemission profile, readily biodegradable and nontoxic.The objective of our work is to produce biodiesel from a renewable andsustainable energy resource which is sunflower oil through transesterificationprocess using alkaline catalyst and methanol, to optimize some parameters in theaim to obtain the best reaction yield, and to study some biodiesel’s properties suchas kinematic viscosity, density, cloud, and flash points; the biodiesel was analyzedby infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The resultsof the analysis confirm that the synthesized biodiesel is a mixture of fatty acidmethyl esters, a comparative study of biodiesel has been conducted versus standardbiodiesel ASTM D6751, and the results obtained show good properties whencompared to those of biodiesel’s standard.