Green Approach for Biodiesel Production from Jojoba Oil Supported by Process Modeling and Simulation

Currently the economics of biodiesel production is the main obstacle to its large-scale industrialization. The high cost is mainly due to the cost of the expensive feedstocks used in the production process. In the past years, researchers have studied several methods to reduce the production cost of biodiesel. One method involved replacing the edible oil feedstock with the non edible one such as Jojoba oil. In this research Jojoba oil was extracted by subcritical water technology to produce jojoba oil-based biodiesel. This represents a promising alternative route for cleaner and sustainable fuel production through transestrification reaction with methanol catalyzed by potassium hydroxide. The transestrification reaction has been optimized in batch reactor with a molar ratio of 6:1 methanol to jojoba oil, using a concentration of 1.35 wt% potassium hydroxide and vigorous stirring of 600 rpm at different temperatures of 25, 40 and 50 degrees C. The obtained conversions under these conditions were 83, 87, and 95% after 80, 50, and 25 min, respectively. Based on the obtained data, a complete design for the process was developed and optimized by using ASPEN HYSYS simulation software. The maximum expected yields of methyl jojoboate, jojobyl alcohol, and methanol recovery were found to be 99.14, 93.3 and 99.9 %, respectively.