• Journal of the Korean Applied Science and Technology
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.324-332
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• 2019

Most countries including Korea and Indonesia have strong policy for implementing biofuels like biodiesel. Shortage of the oil feedstock is the main barrier for increasing the supply of biodiesel fuel. In this study, in order to improve the stability of feedstock supply and lower the biodiesel production cost, the feasibility of biodiesel production using two types of Indonesian tropical crop oils, pressed at different harvesting times, were investigated. R. Trisperma oils, a high productive non-edible feedstocks, were investigated to produce biodiesel by esterification and transesterification because of it's high impurity and free fatty acid contents. the kindly provided oils from Indonesia were required to perform the filtering and water removal process to increase the efficiency of the esterificaton and transesterification reactions. The esterification used heterogeneous acid catalyst, Amberlyst-15. Before the reaction, the acid value of two types oil were 41, 17 mg KOH/g respectively. After the pre-esterification reaction, the acid value of oils were 3.7, 1.8 mg KOH/g respectively, the conversions were about 90%. Free fatty acid content was reduced to below 2%. Afterwards, the transesterification was performed using KOH as the base catalyst for transesterification. The prepared biodiesel showed about 93% of FAME content, and the total glycerol content was 0.43%. It did not meet the quality specification(FAME 96.5% and Total glycerol 0.24%) since the tested oils were identified to have a uncommon fatty acid, generally not found in vegetable oils, ${\alpha}$-eleostearic acid with much contents of 10.7~33.4%. So, it is required to perform the further research on reaction optimization and product purification to meet the fuel quality standards. So if the biodiesel production technology using un-utilized non-edible feedstock oils is successfully developed, stable supply of the feedstock for biodiesel production may be possible in the future.