Review of Various Technologies Used for Biodiesel Production

Abstract

The energy crises, mainly the rapid depletion of fossil fuels are considered as an important global problem. Thus it necessitates to search for an alternative source of fuel to meet the energy demand. Energy can be produced from different sources among which vegetable oils, non-edible oils and organic waste are considered as potential feed stock for producing biodiesel. Biodiesel is an alternative fuel and it solves the problem of depending on the non-renewable resources. But the major concern with the biodiesel production is that it involves high production cost, purification of the final product and technical constraints associated with the process. Therefore in the recent time, lot of improvements are done with respect to biodiesel production process and the attention is paid for developing process intensification technologies to address the above problems. Various modified methods for producing biodiesel are pyrolysis, supercritical process, ultrasound, reactive distillation, reactive separation, microwave technique and membrane separation. Thus in the current study the biodiesel production from these methods were discussed and the benefits and the drawbacks of these processes were reviewed.