Abstract
This study investigated the synthesis of a bifunctional heterogeneous solid catalyst to produce
environmentally benign biodiesel from sesame seed oil. The heterogeneous solid catalyst was
synthesized using periwinkle shell as support material while functionalization was carried out
using nickel-strontium mixed metal oxides via wet impregnation method. The synthesized catalyst
was characterized using X-ray fluorescence (XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD, Fourier transform
infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Brunauer, Emmett and
Teller (BET) analysis. Artificial neural networks (ANN) used to model the parametric effect of
reaction time, reaction temperature, catalyst concentration and methanol to oil ratio biodiesel
yield. The results obtained showed that an oil yield of 50% was obtained after extraction. The oil
had a low kinematic viscosity, acid value, iodine value and peroxide values, making it a suitable
feedstock for biodiesel production. Characterization of the solid catalyst revealed that it had a
high surface area of 367.40 m2/g, pore diameter of 2.45 nm and pore volume of 0.198 cm3
/g. ANN was was adequate in modelling the process with high R2 value (0.9980), adjusted R2 value (0.9977)
and low error values (MSE =0.7547, RMSE =0.868, SEP=1.4091, MAE =0.3348 and AAD =0.5962). Numerical optimization gave a maximum biodiesel yield of 95.61% at corresponding reaction time, reaction temperature, catalyst concentration, and methanol to oil ratio values of 62.55 min, 77.59oC, 3.20 wt%, and 6.50 respectively. The properties of the biodiesel sample produced at the optimized conditions were comparable with the ASTM D6571 and EN 14214 standards.