After processing the cooking oil, what percentage of it would be biodiesel? and what percentage would be Glycerol?

Hi everybody,
This is just about my biodiesel experiment for school. When i let the glycerol in the vegetable oil biodiesel (mixed with new vegetable oil, and sodium methoxide) settle for about 3 days, the stuff thats settled at the bottom is white, which i shall assume as glycerol. But i noticed in other online experiments, they are a dark amber, so did I do anything wrong??? And also i tried mixing peanut oil with sodium methoxide, and there is something cloudy in the peanut oil, which just can’t be filtered out. What did I do wrong? (I used a magnetix mixer/heater for everything.)

Biodiesel is made by chemically reacting vegetable oil or animal fat (or combinations of oils and fats) with alcohol (usually nearly pure methanol or 200 proof ethanol) and a catalyst (sodium hydroxide, or lye). The oil is chemically acidic; the alcohol is chemically a base. This chemical reaction breaks the fat molecules in the oils into an ester, which is the biodiesel fuel, and glycerol. This reaction is called transesterification. Since the biodiesel is less dense than the glycerol, it floats on top of the glycerol and may be pumped off, or the glycerol can be drained off the bottom. The fuel can then be filtered and used in heating or lighting applications. Some people use it in diesel engines without further processing, but others recommend removing impurities (soap, un-reacted alcohol, and sodium hydroxide) by a washing process.

Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) is vegetable oil that has become unfit for food preparation. The common causes of this degradation are: Chemical degradation, including oxidation. Its uses include: Animal feed additive. Fuel for waste-to-energy plants. Use as a biofuel, especially: As feedstock for the production of biodiesel by transesterification. But it was the waste vegetable oil (WVO) that MVNU”s Pioneer College Caterers paid a fee to get rid of each month that got him excited. Could the University somehow transform that to power maintenance equipment or even buses? That’s when he found two resources that made the idea a reality a company and a champion.

1853-1976
Long before the advent of diesel engine, studies on conversion of vegetable oil into biodiesel were conducted in 1853 by the two scientists Duffy and Patrick. It was only on August 10, 1893 that Rudolf Diesel ran the first diesel engine at Augsburg, Germany and the day is still commemorated as the “International Biodiesel Day” every year in honor of that landmark event. In 1900 at the World Fair in Paris, Otto Company of France demonstrated a diesel engine that ran on peanut oil devised by Rudolf Diesel which was a pioneering effort in the development of biodiesel although strictly speaking it was not exactly biodiesel but biofuel since transesterification, the process for converting vegetable oil into biodiesel was unknown at that time. Rudolf Diesel being a visionary realized the important role the fuel made from biomass was going to play in future for running engines. However the makers of biofuel from vegetable oil were finding the process expensive and the petroleum industry took this opportunity to aggressively market petroleum diesel which was cheaper. Petroleum oil compared to vegetable oil was found to be less gelling and the diesel engines were modified accordingly by the manufacturers during the twenties to enable use of petroleum diesel. Biomass fuels like biodiesel as a result got shelved for many years and the manufacturing facilities fell into decay. In spite of this slump, the IC engines continued to use vegetable oil as fuel during the period from the twenties and up to the fifties in countries like the UK, France, Germany, Brazil, China and Japan. The first production of actual biodiesel was by Chavanne, a scientist at the University of Brussels in Belgium who got a patent for it in 1937. This patent was for the process of transesterification or alcoholysis by which vegetable oil was converted for use as fuel. The process involved treating vegetable oils with ethanol and methanol to replace glycerol with alcohol after separating fatty acid from the glycerol. This production process continued till the mid seventies.

1977-1989
A modified process of transesterification to produce biodiesel using ethanol was patented in 1977 by Parente, a Brazilian scientist. This process has since been recognized and accepted by the automobile industry as the standardized one for making biodiesel internationally. Another product ‘bio-kerosene’ by Tecbio owned by Parente has also been patented and certified by Boeing and NASA for use as aviation biodiesel. In 1979 a process was developed in South Africa whereby sunflower oil was converted to biodiesel by the process of transesterification. However it was not before 1983 that biodiesel suitable for use in automobile engine was produced, tested and accepted worldwide. The first plant using rapeseed oil to produce biodiesel at industrial scale was set up in 1989 by the Austrian firm Gaskoks.

1990-Present
Biodiesel plants started to be set up in many European countries from the early nineties. Continuous researches are being conducted to increase the proportion of the fuel up to 50% in combination with petroleum diesel. Service stations in Europe are selling 100% biodiesel. Minnesota in 2005 became the first state in the USA to stipulate minimum 2% biodiesel to be mixed in diesel fuel.

More articles:
Biodiesel Fundamentals – Biodiesel: Applications & Uses