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Biodiesel production from waste cooking oil via supercritical methanol: Optimisation and reactor simulation

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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>31/08/2018
<mark>Journal</mark>Renewable Energy
Volume124
Number of pages11
Pages (from-to)144-154
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date23/06/17
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Biodiesel production using supercritical methanol in the absence of catalyst has been analysed by studying the main factors affecting biodiesel yield. A quadratic polynomial model has been developed using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). Box-Behnken Design (BBD) has been used to evaluate the influence of four independent variables i.e. methanol to oil (M:O) molar ratio, temperature, pressure and time on biodiesel yield. The optimum biodiesel yield is 91% at M:O molar ratio, temperature, pressure and reaction time of 37:1, 253.5oC, 198.5 bar and 14.8 minutes, respectively. Overall reaction kinetics has been studied at optimum conditions concluding a pseudo first order reaction with reaction rate constant of 0.0006 s-1. Moreover, thermodynamics of the reaction has been analysed in the temperature range between 240 and 280oC concluding frequency factor and activation energy of 4.05 s-1 and 50.5 kJ/mol, respectively. A kinetic reactor has been simulated on HYSYS using the obtained kinetic data resulting in 91.7% conversion of triglycerides (TG) with 0.2% relative error from the experimental results.