Acid base catalyzed transesterification kinetics of waste cooking oil

The present study reports the results of kinetics study of acid base catalyzed two step transesterification process of waste cooking oil, carried out at pre-determined optimum temperature of 65 °C and 50 °C for esterification and transesterification process respectively under the optimum condition of methanol to oil ratio of 3:7 (v/v), catalyst concentration 1%(w/w) for H2SO4 and NaOH and 400 rpm of stirring. The optimum temperature was determined based on the yield of ME at different temperature. Simply, the optimum concentration of H2SO4 and NaOH was determined with respect to ME Yield. The results indicated that both esterification and transesterification reaction are of first order rate reaction with reaction rate constant of 0.0031 min− 1 and 0.0078 min− 1 respectively showing that the former is a slower process than the later. The maximum yield of 21.50% of ME during esterification and 90.6% from transesterification of pretreated WCO has been obtained. This is the first study of its kind which deals with simplified kinetics of two step acid–base catalyzed transesterification process carried under the above optimum conditions and took about 6 h for complete conversion of TG to ME with least amount of activation energy. Also various parameters related to experiments are optimized with respect to ME yield.