Biodiesel production from rubber seed oil using calcined eggshells impregnated with Al₂O₃ as heterogeneous catalyst: A comparative study of RSM and ANN optimization

Experimental parameters influencing the transesterification of rubber seed oil (RSO) to biodiesel using alumina (Al₂O₃) impregnated on calcined eggshells (Al₂O₃/calcined eggshells) were studied in the present work. Parameters were optimized using response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN). A conversion of 98.9% was observed for RSO at optimum conditions of 12:1 methanol: oil molar ratio, 3 (wt%) catalyst concentration and 4 (h) of reaction time. A significant quadratic model with molar ratio as the most influencing process parameter and a coefficient of determination, R², of value equal to 0.9379 is observed from RSM analysis. Best validation performance of 5.8595 at epoch-1 and R² value equal to 0.9740 was observed from ANN modeling. On comparing RSM and ANN models, it is concluded that ANN is a better tool for predicting the conversion of RSO to biodiesel with minimum error. (author)