Concentration of biopetrol synthesized from oleic acid using granular metal as catalyst

The demand of gasoline are increasing year by year due to the changes on human activities where almost technologies used petroleum as their raw material to operates machine and generate power from it. Biopetrol is the alternative way to reduce the application of using petroleum where it is a new technology that more environmental friendly and furthermore it is the latest finding in research after biodiesel, bio-ethanol and bio-butanol. In this study, oleic acid are used as a raw material, catalytic cracking are method that used together with granular copper as a catalyst. The simple cracking method will be undergoes with four selected different amount of catalyst which is 1 gram, 5 gram, 10 gram and 20 gram. After heating, the further sample analysis would be classified as four selected percentage of sample that dilute with hexane grade HPLC which is 1%, 5%, 10% and 20%. The heat required not exceed to 98oC so that the isooctane compound would not destroyed due to the overheat that applied. The sample will be analyzing with Gas Chromatography (GC) with the Fire Ionization Detector method (FID). The sample will be compare with the retention time of standard calibration of pure isooctane in order to determine the actual concentration of isooctane in sample. The highest concentration that obtained is 5.34% at sample 20% analysis in 20 gram of granular copper. Compared to the method that used from previous study between thermal and catalytic cracking, the previous study only obtained 3.32% while catalytic cracking increased to 5.34% of Isooctane