Great for frying, perfect for your skin, and irreplicable in a ketogenic diet, coconut oil is a wonderful product.
In the future it may even power our passenger aircraft.
Chemists in Japan recently conducted extensive experiments on whether it would be possible to create a sustainable aviation fuel out of coconut oil, and not only were they a success, they outperformed existing biofuels across several metrics.
Compared to high pressures and intense heating required to synthesize sustainable aviation fuel out of existing biofuel feedstocks, the chemists’ co-solvent method created an aviation-compatible fuel at room temperature pressure and lower levels of heat.
This minimized the fuel’s carbon footprint even before the researchers cut it with kerosene, poured it into a micro jet engine, and set it on fire to see what would happen.
The ultimate tests—of how the mixture performed in the engine—generated “thermal efficiency… comparable to that of pure kerosene.” One drawback on pure performance metrics was that fuel consumption was slightly elevated due to the coconut oil’s lower ignition temperature.
In terms of the emissions profile, the largest observed improvements over kerosene was the release of unburned hydrocarbons. Called UHCs in the industry, or sometimes VOCs (volatile organic compounds) they include substances like butane, and result from incomplete fuel combustion and fuel vaporization.
Their creation is highly dependent on the state of the aircraft. When the aircraft is in taxi, or idling, and engine temperatures are lower, these UHCs are released in much greater proportions, yet were reduced between 5 and 40% depending on the quantity of coconut fuel that was added, with larger amounts of biofuel resulting in greater reductions in UHC emissions.
In terms of CO2 and nitric oxide, levels remained consistent with kerosene regardless of the blending ratios which ranged from 10% biofuel-90% kerosene, to an even 50-50 blend.
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Where the coconut biofuel really proved compelling was its production process, the co-solvent method. Here, wasted coconut fruit discarded during commercial oil extraction process was used, combined with 10% acetone and an alcohol (either methylene or ethylene) and processed simply first using room temperatures followed by less-than-boiling temperatures.
Additionally, both glycerin and biodiesel fuel are created and can be harvested as byproducts, while the reagents of acetone and alcohol can both be recovered circularly.
The team from Osaka Metropolitan University described their work as the first-ever experiments creating biofuels from coconuts and testing them in a jet engine. They believe more research is needed before the process could come to commercialization, mostly because of an observed increase in carbon monoxide emissions combined with jet fuel, which could be harmful to ground crews.
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