Purification of biodiesel by choline chloride based deep eutectic solvent

Purification is a crucial step in biodiesel production to meet the biodiesel standard. This study purified biodiesel using choline chloride based deep eutectic solvent (DES). DES was used to reduce unreacted oil and unsaponifiable matter in rice bran oil based biodiesel. The objective of this work was to study the effect of extraction time using DES on the content and yield of fatty acid methyl ester (FAME). Rice bran used in this work contains 16.49 % of oil with initial free fatty acids (FFA) of 44.75 %. Acid catalyzed methanolysis was employed to convert rice bran oil (RBO) into biodiesel under following operation conditions: T = 60 °C, t = 8 h, molar ratio of oil to methanol = 1/10, H2SO4 = 1% w/w of oil. Rice bran oil based biodiesel obtained contain 89.05 % of FAME with very low FFA content (0.05 %). DES was made from a mixture of choline chloride and ethylene glycol with molar ratio of 1/2. Molar ratio of crude biodiesel to DES were 1/2 and 1/4. Extraction time was varied from 15 minutes to 240 minutes at 30 °C. The highest FAME content was obtained after purification for 240 min. at molar ratio crude biodiesel to DES 1/4 was 96.60 %. This work shows that DES has potential to purify biodiesel from non-edible raw material, such as RBO.