9. Biofuel Production from Sunflower Oil and Determination of Fuel Properties

The depletion of crude oil is central to the debate on energy, and the subject becomes even more pressing because of the rapid industrial development of emerging countries that hangs over demand. Growing emissions of combustion generated pollutants, and their increasing costs will make biomass sources more attractive. Currently, biodiesel is becoming popular as a more environment-friendly fuel, because it is a renewable, domestic resource with an environment-friendly emission profile, readily biodegradable and nontoxic.

The objective of our work is to produce biodiesel from a renewable and sustainable energy resource which is sunflower oil through transesterification process using alkaline catalyst and methanol, to optimize some parameters in the aim to obtain the best reaction yield, and to study some biodiesel’s properties such as kinematic viscosity, density, cloud, and flash points; the biodiesel was analyzed by infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The results of the analysis confirm that the synthesized biodiesel is a mixture of fatty acid methyl esters, a comparative study of biodiesel has been conducted versus standard biodiesel ASTM D6751, and the results obtained show good properties when compared to those of biodiesel’s standard.