Thermal stability of biodiesel and its blends: A review

The vegetable oil, fats and their biodiesel suffer with the drawback of deterioration of its quality during long term storage unlike petroleum diesel due to large number of environmental and other factors making the fuel stability and quality questionable. There are various types of stabilities like oxidation, storage and thermal, playing key roles in making the fuel unstable. The present paper is an attempt to review the work done so far on the thermal stability of biodiesel and their blends with diesel under different conditions. The mechanism of thermal deterioration of vegetable oils, various methods of stability measurement including a new proposed method based on Karl Fischer coulometer, an alternative to conventional Rancimat test has been discussed. No correlations have been found in the literature among the results of various methods used. The effect of antioxidants on the stability parameters has also been discussed. TGA/DTA has been found as an effective method to check the deterioration of oil with respect to temperature using activation energy and order of reaction as the parameter to monitor the deterioration of oil. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.