fairfolio
Saved Projects

Transesterification of Peanut Oil: Acid vs. Base Catalyst

CSEF · 2016 Chemistry

Jada Smith · Baechtel Grove Middle School, Willits, Mendocino County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this project was to see if NaOH as a catalyst (substance used to speed up transesterification) or Hydrochloric acid as a catalyst would produce more biofuel. Methods/Materials Peanut oil, methanol, sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, separation funnel, microwave Results My Hypothesis was correct. After repeating the trials three times, I learned that using the NaOH catalyst ended up producing more biofuel than using the hydrochloric acid catalyst. The results pertain to my objective because I wanted to see which catalyst made more yield of biofuel. Conclusions/Discussion My final results concluded that if you were going to make biofuel, it's best to use NaOH as a catalyst rather than hydrochloric acid. Even though The hydrochloric acid has the potential to make more yield, it takes a whole lot more equipment and time.

Summary statement

As measured by weight, I was able to conclude that with the procedure I used, an acid catalyst does not produce as much yield as a base catalyst.

Help received

My dad helped me with my research, my experiment, and getting my materials to complete this project.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2016 Chemistry · Entry J0629

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google