Hanns Wetzel in PNG wrote: "Does anyone know what proportions of ethanol and potassium hydroxide per volume of palm oil have to be used to produce biodiesel from palm oil, or does anyone know of a site on the web where this process is described like on the URL mentioned above.
I am looking for info on how this could be done in Papua New Guinea, a large scale producer of palm oil." I'm ttying to work out more or less the same thing here in the Philippines, only for coconut oil. The procedure is simple in principle but rather laborious in practice. You start with the composition of the oil: what triglycerides are present and in what proportions. That allows you to calculate the weight of glycerol per unit weight of oil. Glycerin is a trihydroxy alcohol and ethanol and methanol are both monohydroxy alcohols, so each molecule of glycerin has to be replaced in the transesterified product with three molecules of either ethanol or methanol. That, and the respective molecular weights of glycerol and the alcohol you're using for biodiesel will give you the stoichiometric amount of (m)ethanol required. That is not the final answer, but it is a starting point for experimentation on small batches on the benchtop. You can work out the exact proportions at small scale, with purchased anhydrous alcohol, while working out a way to get larger amounts cheap. Somewhere in my files is something on that topic, too, if I can just find it... Somewhere in the rat's next that passes for my file system I should have something on palm oil and palm kernel oil compositions, which I ran into while researching coconut oil. Naturally I can't put my hand on it now, but I suspect you already have that info, living in a major producing area. My scheme-in-progress still centers on methanol, which I hope to produce locally by destructive distallation of agricultural waste. One tiny problem is I can't find any info anywhere on how much of the stuff I might expect from the materials available here. Before petro-methanol became too cheap to compete with, methanol sold in the West was produced by distilling hardwood chips in a closed retort, so there's plenty of info on yields from temperate zone hardwoods. Too bad we don't see those in our outposts of civilization. I don't think I'm up to building a retort, plus all the apparatus for separating tars and purifying the methanol, just to get numbers... Marc de Piolenc Iligan, Lanao del Norte (Mindanao) Philippines Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
