Improving the Technology Synthesis and Properties of Biodiesel

Abstract

Existing technologies for the synthesis of active additives to motor fuels are quite complicated. Therefore,
improvement of the technology of biodiesel fuel synthesis in order to increase the cetane number and and
improvement of other diesel fuel characteristics with combustion activators is an urgent problem. Raw materials
for the biodiesel production are vegetable oils methanol and ethanol with the alkaline or acid catalyst usage. The
use of ethyl esters of long-chain fatty acids of rapeseed oil as biodiesel has a number of advantages compared
with the methyl ester use [2]. Thus, biodiesel fuel was synthesized by transesterification of rapeseed oil with
absolute ethanol (99.9 %), which was dehydrated with calcium oxide (95 %) freshly prepared, using sodium
ethoxide as a catalyst [3]. In order to achieve a high degree of mixing of a heterogeneous system, which consists
of natural oil and ethyl alcohol, a specially synthesized non-ionic emulsifier was used as a reagent. The
technological features of this type of a rapeseed oil transesterification process were studied and the main
characteristics of the new diesel fuels such as fractional composition and molecular mass were estimated using
the chromatographic method and mass spectrometry. The yield of biodiesel from rapeseed oil increases from 85 -
90 % to 95 – 98 % without waste fraction of glycerol (10 – 15 %).