PEMBUATAN BIOETANOL GEL SEBAGAI BAHAN BAKAR ALTERNATIF PENGGANTI MINYAK TANAH

Abstract

Bioethanol is an alternative potential fuel because of its source can be regenerated. However, the use of bioethanol as fuel to substitute the kerosene is still rare. It is because the plant that produce bioethanol still limit and the obstacle when distribute it which is easy to spill out. Beside that, liquid bioethanol has high risk to spill out and to explode because of its volatility property. For solving the problem, liquid bioethanol will be changed to gelled one. The objectives of this research are to learn the influence of water and carbopol to flash point, heat value and viscosity of gelled bioethanol. Controlled variables in this research are bioethanol 90% (weight) ; mixing time an hour and dependent variables are carbopol 0,85%;1,05%;1,25% (% weight) and water 7,5%;7,9%;8,3% ( % weight) .The data will be processed by using Response Surface Methodology (RSM) so it will gain the result such as the influence of each variables to the formed bioethanol gell and the optimum operation condition. From the research it was found that the flash point was influenced by the percentage of water and percentage of carbopol; heat value was influenced by the percentage of water, percentage of carbopol and the interaction within it; viscosity was influenced by the percentage of carbopol. The optimum value of flash point, 21 0C and the optimum value of heat value, 4000 cal/g was achieved when the the percentage of water was 7,9 % and the percentage of carbopol was 1,09 %.