The production of biodiesel using waste triglycerides as feedstock offers economic advantages over its production from edible oils. However, because of its high acidity and chemical complexity, many problems arise in the production of biodiesel. To facilitate the use of waste oils as a feedstock of biofuels, there is an alternative method to obtain pyrolytic oil by thermal–chemical conversion. In this paper, we discuss our observations on the production of biofuels by a pyrolysis reaction from high-acid-value waste oil. It was found that the pyrolytic products consisted of hydrocarbon compounds accompanied by undesired products, such as carboxylic acids. These pyrolytic oils were further reacted with an alcohol to decrease their acid value. The results showed that the acid number of the pyrolytic oil decreased dramatically from 28.8 to 2.0 mg of KOH/g after esterification. The results of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy analyses indicated that the pyrolysis of waste oil generates fuels that have chemical compositions comparable to that of petroleum-based fuel.
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Xu et al. (2011) studied this question.
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