Irradiation Enhanced Synthesis and Characterization of Biodiesel from Vegetable Oil-A Short Review

Abstract

Depletion of petroleum resources continues to be an important global issue. To overcome this issue, biodiesel is gaining more and more importance as an alternative, renewable and sustainable fuel. Chemically biodiesel is ester of monoalkyl fatty acid derived through catalytic transesterification process from mostly non-edible vegetable oil. The transesterification process is influenced by the mode of reaction condition, molar ratio of alcohol to oil, type of alcohol, reaction time and temperature. Transesterification process by conventional heating needs more reaction time which is dramatically reduced by using suitable irradiation techniques like ultrasound, microwave or sunlight as heating sources. Other parameters like alcohol- oil ratio and quantity of catalysts are also influenced by the irradiation. Choice of catalyst along with the type of irradiation is also a critical parameter. Type and power of irradiation also influence some of the process parameters. In this paper, available literature on irradiation-enhanced synthesis of biodiesel with different combination of oil and catalysts has been reviewed.