Experimental research on biodiesel production from waste chicken fat

As one kind of clean alternative biofuel with better engine and emission performance, biodiesel catches great enthusiasm in research and industry sectors. However, the steady supply of cheap oil resources has becoming the bottleneck for biodiesel industrilization. The potential of waste chicken fat as the feedstock for biodiesel was explored in this paper. With the variation of food structure of people, more and more waste animal fat and grease are produced, like chicken fat and beef tallow. The paper focuses on biodiesel production from waste chicken fat (WCF) with specific reference to experimental procedures and product analysis. For the relatively high acid value of WCF feedstock, transesterification combined with pre-esterification was applied for biodiesel preparation, followed by vaccum distillation. Sodium hydroxide was used as catalyst for the transesterification of oil feedstock. Factors that influence the conversion efficiency was discussed, including methanol/oil molar ratio, amount of alkaline catalyst, reaction temperature and reaction time. The relatively suitable condition obtained for the transesterification of WCF was achieved at 9︰1 methanol/oil molar ratio, 1.3% catalyst, 50℃ and 90～120 minutes reaction. And the conversion of oil feedstock would be above 90%. Most characteristics of biodiesel product from WCF are compatible with EN14214 standard. But the low temperature flowability of WCF biodiesel should be improved further.