Quality Assessment of Biodiesels Obtained from PureCooking Oils of Some Feedstocks and their Waste Oils

Biodiesel being a renewable energy resource possesses compositional variability based on the typeof feedstock. Biodiesel is considered a cleaner burning fuel and can be used as pure B100 orblended with petro-diesel. In this study, biodiesel was prepared from pure cooking oils (soybeanoil, canola oil, sunflower oil, corn oil) and their waste frying oils by base-catalyzedtransesterification with methanol in presence of sodium hydroxide. The optimized experimentalparameters were applied to achieve the maximum yield of biodiesel. Various fuel properties likekinematic viscosity, flash point, pour point, cloud point, total acid number, specific gravity, waterand sediments, conradson carbon residue, sulfur contents, phosphorous contents, sulphated ash,cetane and copper corrosion were determined and found comparable to ASTM standards. Purecooking oils, their waste frying oils and prepared biodiesels were characterized by FT-IR. Thestudy showed that the biodiesel derived from waste frying oils can be a promising alternative ofthe biodiesel from pure cookingoils.