Measurements of physical properties during transesterification of soybean oil to biodiesel for prediction of reaction progress

Biodiesel is a pure, non-toxic, biodegradable, clean-burning fuel and renewable alternative for fossil diesel fuel. In this work, a new method was introduced to determine reaction progress in transesterification of soybean oil to biodiesel by the use of physical property variation during reaction. Quantitative analysis stage for determination fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) which is expensive and time-consuming can be replaced by this method. To develop the method, in the first stage, transesterification of soybean oil at optimum conditions (70 °C with MeOH to oil molar ratio of 12:1 and 5 wt.% of BaO as catalyst) was carried out to determine how conversion and physical properties change with time. Then appropriate functions were fitted on the extracted data and were evaluated by comparison with GC results. Refractive index was selected as good physical property to predict reaction progress.