Biodiesel, which is the fatty acid methyl ester, is a clean and renewable energy, in any natural oils as raw materials, processed with methanol by produced chemical liquid fuels. Biodiesel production of raw materials can be of various animal fats, but a lot of animals and plants oil prices are higher, and the 75 percent cost of biodiesel is feedstock, readily available and cheap palm oil has become the best preparation of the bio-diesel raw materials.
However, the press resulting crude palm oil contains more free fatty acids and other impurities, the direct esterification reaction takes too long but also consume a large amount of an alkali catalyst to produce a sodium soap, so before biodiesel produced, are bases its first alkali practice and dry filtration pretreatment.
Crude palm oil pretreated in the vessel under the action of an alkali catalyst (sodium methoxide, sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, etc.) in transesterification with methanol, fatty acid methyl esters, i.e. biodiesel.
Research shows that the optimum conditions for the reaction of methyl alcohol to oil ratio of 6: 1, the catalyst mass is 0.5%, reaction temperature 60 ℃, reaction time was 60min, at this time, the yield can reach 96%. This process equipment is simple, mature technology suitable for small-scale production.