Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Microemulsion is the promising techniques that can be used to reduce vegetable oil viscosity. In this study, microemulsion-based biofuel consisting of vegetable oil/diesel blends, ethanol and surfactant/cosurfactant mixture were formulated. The goal of this work focuses on the effects of a numbers of ethylene oxide group, EOn (n =1, 5, and 9) in nonionic alcohol ethoxylate surfactant and the effect of cosurfactant structures, straight chain (1-octanol) and branch chain alcohols (2-ethyl-1-hexanol) to reverse micelle microemulsion fuel formation. In addition, biodiesel and bioethanol were used to replace diesel and ethanol, receptively with the aim to formulated microemulsion fuels with absolute bio-based product. The kinematic viscosity which was selected as a key parameter was determined at 40 oC (ASTM D445). The microemulsion aggregate size was investigated as a parameter affecting by numbers of EO groups in nonionic surfactant. The results show that, no observed trend in kinematic viscosity was found when number of EO groups in nonionic surfactants increases. The kinematic viscosity of palm oil-diesel/biodiesel blends with 2-ethyl-1-hexanol was less than that of palm oil-diesel/ biodiesel blends with 1-octanol system. In additional, the kinematic viscosities of all systems containing regular diesel were higher than that of biodiesel. For the microemulsion droplet size, the size of surfactant aggregates increases with an increase in the number of EO groups. In addition, the droplet size of microemulsion fuel systems with octanol as cosurfactant were smaller than the systems with 2- ethyl-1-hexanol cosurfactant.