BioDiesel for all

Since fuel has become a part of everybody's lives, there is no way we can do without. Biodiesel is now the in thing when it comes to biofuel or alternative sources of energy. But then, the biodiesel production waste created in the manufacturing of biodiesel is becoming an issue for environment-concerned groups. This biodiesel waste contains mainly glycerol and methanol which are made up of carbons.

Just recently, it was explained that certain bioreactors which are needed for mine water treatment for the sulfate-reducing bacteria they contain. These sulfate-reducing bacteria feed on certain carbons, particularly glycerol. Thus, a theory sprung that it may be possible to utilize the biodiesel glycerol byproduct to feed the sulfate-reducing bacteria in order to reduce the sulfate found in mining waste. If this is possible, not only is the liquid from mining drainages treated but biodiesel waste will also be consumed. Both of these wastes will therefore be reduced and consequently, the environment will have less pollution.

So, a project was carried out to prove the theory. A number of laboratory columns containing sulfate were fed with reagent-grade glycerol while the rest of the laboratory columns were fed with the glycerol from biodiesel waste. The goal was to reduce fifty percent of the sulfate in the columns. The project proved a success since the glycerol from biodiesel waste reduced fifty five percent of the sulfate while the reagent-grade glycerol reduced fifty percent. This proved that the glycerol from biodiesel production waste was more effective. Aside from this, the biodiesel glycerol byproduct is cost-efficient since it is technically waste material and hardly costs anything at all. Other tests show that biodiesel waste is also capable of reducing concentrations of acetic, formic, lactic, and propionic acids and the organic carbon found in the biodiesel waste was even converted to carbon dioxide.

Biodiesel production waste may be rubbish but it serves as a wonderful component of decreasing one of the largest sources of pollution.

We're now going to talk about doing a titration. When you collect waste vegetable oil from a restaurant or from anywhere that they use the oil, the oil is typically going to be well used, it's going to be somewhat acidic, and it'll be important to find out how acidic it is so that we can neutralize that acid with excess lye. 

We're going to talk about how we do it here on the board.

First of all we need to make a known amount of base. In theory what we're doing is we have an unknown amount of acid, and we can make a known amount of base. We're then going to take a sample of oil, we're going to add a pH indicator into it, and the one that we choose to use is called phenolphalene. It's very popular and the industry views it as the most scientific one. You can actually use phenol red, or tumeric, or pH strips, but the one I like to use is this phenol phaylene.

So I'm just going to label it phenol because it's a really long word, and if you want to know what it is look up on my site and I'll show you spell it. So, phenol is our pH indicator. Kay so basically what we're going to do is take some oil, we're going to add it to some alcohol, and the alcohol is neutral, so the alcohol is just going to be a solvent to put that we can put it in so that we can dilute it. So we've got an oil, alcohol and we're going to put a few drops of our pH indicator in there, and then we're going to add known amounts of our base solution in there. We're going to do that in milliliters at a time. What we're doing, what we're watching for is this pH indicator to change, or indicate a pH higher than about 8.5.

So what we're going to do is, as we add known amounts of the base, our goal is to figure out how much base solution it's going to take to neutralize that acid. You remember on a pH scale you've got zero to about fifteen, lower is acid higher is base. We're going to add known amounts of base to an acid until our pH indicator indicates that we've neutralized that acid. That known amount that we get is, I don't know, let's say about four milliliters. We're than going to plug into a formula to tell us how much lye we're going to use per liter of oil. If you remember from before, our formula for making biodiesel was O (oil) + 20% (methanol) + 7.5 g C (calalyst) if we're using potassium hydroxide.

If it's sodium hydroxide it was 5.5. Well, for a titration we're going to have something called our base, in other words, our starting amount. That starting is always 7.5 if we're using potassium hydroxide. So I know it's going to use 7.5 grams per liter of potassium hydroxide to react brand new oil with 20% methanol into biodiesel, which is what we do when we make a small batch. For titration, I'm going to add a known amount of this base solution until I get it to neutralize, and I measure that, then I add that amount to this base figure. So let's say that we got 5, so that would equal 12.5 (7.5 + 5 = 12.5) grams per liter. That means that I'm going to add an additional 5 grams of potassium hydroxide to neutralize the acid in that oil, so that I have enough lye left over, or potassium hydroxide to make biodiesel with, and that's all we're doing when we do a titration.

Now, to build our known amount of base we're going to make a .1 percent solution of KOH and distilled water. So we're going to add one gram of KOH to one liter of water, and this makes a .1 percent solution, and it's what we use to titrate with, or to add to our acid. This is our known amount. So with that, let's go ahead and we'll make our solution, and we'll do a titration.