Biodiesel production frrom vegetables oils

Biodiesel is gaining more and more importance as an alternative fuel due to thedepleting fossil fuel resources. Chemically biodiesel is monoalkyl esters of long chain fattyacids derived from renewable feed stock like vegetable oils and animal fats. It is produced bytransesterification in which, oil or fat is reacted with a monohydric alcohol in presence of acatalyst. The process of transesterification is affected by the mode of reaction condition,molar ratio of alcohol to oil, type of alcohol, type and amount of catalysts, reaction time andtemperature and purity of reactants.In this work the transformation process of crude vegatable oils and waste oil plants inorder to obtain biodiesel by means of transesterification was studied. A suitable methodologywas chosen for the optimisation of the most important variables (temperature conditions,reactants proportion and methods of purification), with the purpose of obtainig a high qualitybiodiesel with the maximum process yield. In conclusion waste oil plants methyl esters andcrude vegatable oils methyl esters were characterised to test their properties as fuels in dieselengines, such as viscosity, flash point, cloud point, pour point, density, cetane number andacid value.