Abstract:
Recently, solution/liquid-phase plasma is the novel method to provide the direct energy at highly excited energy state. The application of the plasma to pyrolysis of vegetable oil could be an alternative way for reducing the production cost of the green fuel. In this study, the investigation of the green fuel synthesis from vegetables oils using solution plasma was examined. The solution plasma reactor was connected to a bipolar pulsed power supply under 200 ml of palm oil, the pulse frequency adjusted from 15-190 kHz and the voltage adjusted in ranges of 0.55-1.5 kV with 40 minutes of discharge times, pulse width 2 µs, electrode distance 0.5 mm and adding H2O 0,50% weight of palm oil. Properties of generated plasma were investigated by optical emission spectroscopy (OES) methods. The OES graph shown radical are C, CH, C2, H for discharge plasma in pure palm oil and H, C2, O in palm oil adding H2O. The main products of cracking palm oil by plasma technique were gas, liquid and solid. The liquid products were analysed by GC-MS. In order to identify components of the liquid product, a GC-MS chromatogram was carried out; the main peak are oleic acid and palmitic acid. So, the other peak show which product were cracked from long-chain hydrocarbon to short-chain hydrocarbon and hexadecane was one of the compounds which were cracked in palm oil. The best possible condition were pulse frequency at 45 kHz, voltage 1.5 kV with 40 minutes of discharge times, pulse width 2 µs, electrode distance 0.5 mm. In conclusion, the results showed that plasma has potential and enough energy to convert vegetable oils in liquid fuels at room temperature which consumes less temperature than pyrolysis and can also provide the direct energy.