As seen in Table 1, the acid value of corn oil is below
2 mg KOH g1 which is enough to use an alkaline catalyst for
transesterification reaction. The ingredient amounts used in the
transesterification for the corn oil were 7.7 kg methanol, 35 kg corn
oil (6:1 M ratio) and 0.35 kg KOH (1% of oil by weight). Reaction
time and temperature were 2 h and 60 C, respectively. The reaction
parameters were selected by considering the previous studies
(Alptekin and Canakci, 2008a, 2009). Mean molecular weight of
corn oil was found to be about 875 g mol1 calculated from the
fatty acid composition. The fatty acid composition for each oil
and methyl ester can be seen in Table 2. Ester yield is calculated
by dividing the ester amount to the corn oil amount used for
transesterification. After transesterification