Simple and effective technology for sustainable biodiesel production using high-power household fruit blender

A commercial household fruit blender is proposed as a simple, less time-consuming, and effective biodiesel production technique in this research work. Biodiesel was successfully produced in a 1200W commercial household fruit blender. Due to the synergistic effect derived from the very high rotational speed of the blender blades integrated with micro-mixing level from cavitation phenomena, heat and mass transfer became greatly enhanced. The vigorous stirring inherently increased the temperature of the methanol-oil mixture to greater than 60 degrees C in less than 3 min, thus, a provision of external heating was not required. With a methanol to fresh refined palm oil molar ratio of 6:1 and 1 wt% sodium hydroxide catalyst, the FAME yield of 94.5% can be achieved in less than 3 min with the yield efficiency of 33.8 x 10(-4) g/J for 500 mL of reaction volume. For 1000 mL of reaction volume at 1 min of reaction time, the FAME yield of 79.9% can be achieved with the yield efficiency of 122.3 x 10(-4) g/J Properties of the produced FAME comply with the EN 14214 and ASTM D 6751 standards. In conclusion, these results indicate that a high-power commercial household fruit blender can be utilized to produce biodiesel economically and effectively. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.