CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 81, 2020 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.cetjournal.it Guest Editors: Petar S. Varbanov, Qiuwang Wang, Min Zeng, Panos Seferlis, Ting Ma, Jiří J. Klemeš Copyright © 2020, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. ISBN 978-88-95608-79-2; ISSN 2283-9216 Optimization of Biodiesel Production from Neem Oil using KOH Supported with Activated Carbon Abrar Inayat a, *, Chaouki Ghenai a , Dalia Hammad a , Shamma Almarzooqi a , Rumaisa Tariq b , Farrukh Jamil c , Awais Bokhari c , Muhammad Ayoub d a Department of Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering, University of Sharjah, 27272, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates b School of Chemical & Materials Engineering, National University of Sciences & Technology, H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan c Department of Chemical Engineering, Comsats University Islamabad, Lahore campus, Lahore, Pakistan d Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Bander Seri Iskander 31750, Malaysia ainayat@sharjah.ac.ae Fossil fuel reduction and environmental degradations are the two crises that the world threatened by generally and UAE specifically. Biodiesel is a fuel produced through a chemical reaction of animal fat or vegetable oil with alcohol, and consider a potential alternative of diesel engines. However, this reaction needs a catalyst to complete successfully. The current article contains transesterification of neem oil with KOH catalyst supported with activated carbon (KOH/AC). This study included experimental work by applying KOH/AC as an effective catalyst for transesterification of local neem oil. The response surface methodology (RSM) software tool was used in this study to determine the optimal conditions of reaction time, amount of catalyst and ratio of methanol to oil in order to obtain the highest percentage of biodiesel product. The optimal settings obtained were 60 min reaction time, a ratio of oil to methanol 1:6 and 1 wt% of catalyst, which lead to the highest yield of biodiesel (100 wt%). The specific features of biodiesel were checked and compared to ASTM standards. 1. Introduction As fossil fuels expected to be depleted in the future, biomass-based biofuels (especially biodiesel) are gaining attention as novel sustainable petroleum substitutes (Costa et al., 2019). The derived biodiesel has more benefits than that of petroleum alternatives, in terms of biodegradability, nontoxicity, eco-friendliness, and usefulness in reutilization of CO2 quickly (Chuah et al., 2016). Neem seeds are a very abundant type of biomass available in United Arab Emirate, and it contains a good amount of oil that can be extracted easily from it to use it in many applications like biodiesel production. It doesn’t contribute to food consumption because it comes in non-edible oil category (Akhabue et al., 2020). There are three different processes for converting oils into biodiesel such as direct blending, catalytic cracking and transesterification. Effect of catalyst, time and temperature of the reaction and mole ratio are parameters that can affect biodiesel production (Sarno and Iuliano, 2020). Most often, the catalyst used for biodiesel production from biomass is KOH and NaOH (Inayat et al. 2019). It is a common perception that when KOH is concentrated between 2 – 12 %, the transformation will take about 8 h, and the biodiesel will increase from 20 to 95 % (Tiwari et al., 2018). Some advantages of using the activated carbon as a catalyst are the reutilization of catalytic material in the manufacturing procedure, which will make biodiesel production more reliable and decrease in soap formation. Due to its large surface spread (800 – 1,500 m 2 /g), it has good adsorption properties such as resistant to radiation and heat, stable in alkaline and acidic environments and can be castoff again actively. The separation between biodiesel and glycerol will be easier, and the purity of the glycerol will increase by using this. Due to the surface properties and the surface oxides of the activated carbon, it has high catalyst activity. In addition, the production of the activated carbon cost is low (Konwar et al., 2018). This study includes both simulation and experimental work by applying KOH/AC to check the catalytic effect on the transesterification of local neem seed. The central idea of this study is to evaluate the influence of process parameters (time of reaction, amount of catalyst and molar ratio of DOI: 10.3303/CET2081176 Paper Received: 30/04/2020; Revised: 06/06/2020; Accepted: 07/06/2020 Please cite this article as: Inayat A., Ghenai C., Hammad D., Almarzooqi S., Tariq R., Jamil F., Bokhari A., Ayoub M., 2020, Optimization of Biodiesel Production from Neem Oil using KOH Supported with Activated Carbon, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 81, 1051-1056 DOI:10.3303/CET2081176 1051