Abstract:
The increasing use of fossil fuel resources encompasses a burden on the production of overall energy along with continual environmental concerns. The use of biofuels can play a substantial role to contribute for energy production hence waste cooking oil (WCO) utilized for biodiesel production. This study reports the synthesis of copper and calcium based metal organic frameworks (MOFs) as catalysts in the steps of esterification and transesterification. The synthesized catalysts were characterized with XRD, SEM and TGA. XRD results showed sharp characteristics peaks while the crystal size to be 49.04 nm for Cu-MOF while 20.77 nm for Ca-MOF. SEM images showed cubical images of 1.5μm and 2μm for both Cu-MOF and Ca-MOF respectively. TGA results showed that both the materials decomposed at 600°C. The catalysts were then used for their application in the process of biodiesel production from WCO. Furthermore, several standard testing analysis techniques were used to compare the produced samples with standard characteristics of biodiesel such as flashpoint, calorific value and product yield. Flashpoint of Cu-MOF-BD was 130 °C, Ca-MOF-BD was 140 °C and Cu+Ca-MOF-BD was 130.5 °C while calorific value of 40 kJg-1 for each with a conversion of 78.33 %, 78 % and 85 % respectively. These synthesized catalysts acted as effective catalyst for biodiesel production process where as the conversion efficiency can be increased further by focusing on optimization of the transesterification and esterification reactions in future studies.
