Design and performance assessment of an in-house fabricated microreactor for enzyme-catalysed biodiesel synthesis

Abstract

The production of biodiesel from transesterification of oils is the currently available alternative to consumable fuels. The study focuses on the performance assessment of a microreactor platform for biodiesel production. Since a microreactor provides better mass transfer and a higher surface-to-volume ratio, this significantly contributes to augmenting the reaction rate of biodiesel production at reduced cost. In this study, firstly the T-shaped microfluidic reactor was fabricated on a PMMA (poly methyl methacrylate) sheet. Then, the kinetics of enzymatic transesterification reaction for biodiesel synthesis in this reactor was investigated. A combination of sunflower oil and methanol was used as feedstock in the presence of lipase from Thermomyces lanuginous as a catalyst and tert-butanol as a solvent. The reaction was carried out under ambient conditions (1 atm and 30 °C) where 285 v% of tert-butanol was loaded to oil with 4 wt% lipase, and the molar ratio of oil to methanol was 1:2.5. Gas Chromatography was used to measure the concentration of biodiesel. The kinetic parameters such as maximum reaction rate (Vmax) and Michaelis –Menten constant (KM) were found to be 0.725 (mol/L.min) and 0.092 mol/L, respectively. High Vmax and low KM values indicated the better performance of the reactor. In addition, a Lineweaver–Burk plot with excellent coefficient of determination (R2) of 99.5% supported the high performance of the microreactor.