Qualitative Study on production of Methyl ester (Biodiesel) from Castor oil and Nannochloropsis

Biodiesel is evolving to be one of the most employed biofuels for partial replacement of petroleum-based diesel fuel. The most widely used feed stocks for biodiesel production are vegetable oils. But beside this traditional feedstock, microalgae is also of growing interest as a potential feedstock for biodiesel production due to its high lipid content when cultured under certain environment. In this work, biodiesel has been produced from Castor oil and Nannochloropsis Salina. The lipid content from Nannochloropsishas been extracted and converted into methyl ester using Soxhlet extraction (using two different solvents- n-hexane and chloroform and methanol mixture) followed by transesterification and using microwave assisted in-situ transesterification. The result shows that microwave irradiation has positive effect on lipid extraction from microalgae compared to traditional energy intensive Soxhlet extraction method. Although the microwave assisted in-situ transesterification is proved to be more effective for rupturing the rigid cell structure, the scalability of this process may be a challenge for large scale lipid extraction setup. The fatty acid composition of both the biodiesel sample was determined by Gas Chromatography. Results demonstrated that the COME (Castor oil methyl ester) is a better choice for diesel blending than Nannochloropsis Salina methyl ester. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.