ANNOUNCEMENTS
For a vast country like India with over one billion population and having rapid economic growth rate, no single energy resource or technology can constitute a panacea to address all issues related to availability of fuel supplies, environmental impact, particularly, climate change, and associated health externalities. Therefore, it is necessary that all non-carbon emitting resources become an integral part of an energy mix – as diversified as possible – to ensure country’s energy security and sustainability during the present century. Biodiesel is renewable and it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend or can also be used in its pure form. Due to high production rate per unit area and easy maintenance of plantation of jatropha and karanj, these oils getting popularity among the feedstock option for biodiesel in India. Thus, these two oils are selected for the study. There are only few reports available on biodiesel preparation from jatropha and karanja oil resulting nearly 90% of methyl esters. Thus the research problem undertaken here is coupled with assessment of process optimization for maximum biodiesel production and its application for designing the low capacity (100 LPD), energy efficient and cost effective biodiesel plant aimed for rural application. The recommended process parameters for the production of Jatropha ethyl ester (JEE) are: reaction time 75 minutes, reaction temperature 60ºC, molar ration 6:1, and catalyst concentration 3.0% with ethanol purity 85%. In order to obtain best quality of Karanja methyl ester with higher yield, the recommended standard process parameters could be reaction temperature 40°C, reaction time 30 minutes, catalyst concentration 2.0%, and molar ratio 6:1 with aqueous methanol from the cost effective as well as energy efficiency point of view. The proposed design of pilot (100 LPD or 30 tons per annum capacity) biodiesel plant is capable to handle both esterification reaction as well as transesterification process in a non-pressurized reaction vessel, thus can be handled by a semi-skilled labour in remote areas. It can be operated for virgin vegetable oil (edible or non-edible), waste/used cooking oil as well as high free fatty acid (FFA) oil with key advantage of methanol recovery unit without adding much extra cost resulting in reduced biodiesel production cost. With the production rate of 30 tons of biodiesel annually simple pay back period works out to approximately 2.74 years.
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