Abstract
Biodiesel production from palm oil and hydrated ethanol in a fixed bed reactor using CaO/Al2O3 as the catalyst was investigated and optimized using response surface methodology. The investigated parameters were temperature, pressure, ethanol/palm oil molar ratio, residence time and total mass flow rate. The approach was divided into two parts, a preliminary study using broad scale changes over a reasonable range of the above operating parameters and then, using this data to select a narrower range, a finer scale study to optimize the selected narrower operating parameters from the preliminary study. The resultant biodiesel obtained under the optimal conditions (285 °C, 20 MPa, 30:1 ethanol/oil molar ratio, 2 g/min flow rate and 4.85 min residence time) was measured for 11 fuel properties following the International Biodiesel Standard (EN14214), and was found to comply with this International Standard. Moreover, ZnO/Al2O3 and La2O3/Al2O3 catalysts were tested for their activity and stability. Although the La2O3/Al2O3 catalyst had a slightly higher initial activity than that of CaO/Al2O3, it is some 800-fold more expensive. Therefore, the CaO/Al2O3 catalyst has a greater industrial potential than La2O3/Al2O3, when comparing together the technical and economic benefits.
Highlights
The dwindling supplies in the long term and the escalating price of petroleum and emission of greenhouse gases in the short and long terms are increasingly serious problems for many countries, driving an interest in renewable fuels as a long-term solution for the sustainable future
To date the studies on biodiesel production have mostly focused on methanol to form fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), despite the fact that methanol is currently produced primarily from non-renewable sources, such as natural gas
This work aimed to investigate the effects of temperature, pressure, ethanol/palm oil molar ratio and residence time on fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) biodiesel production in supercritical ethanol (SCE) using calcium oxide (CaO)/Al2O3 as a heterogeneous catalyst
Summary
The dwindling supplies in the long term and the escalating price of petroleum and emission of greenhouse gases in the short and long terms are increasingly serious problems for many countries, driving an interest in renewable fuels as a long-term solution for the sustainable future. A mono alkyl ester of long chain fatty acids, is one of the renewable fuels currently of interest, being derived from renewable oil-based biomass, including waste oils, via esterification and/or transesterification reactions with small chain alcohols, such as methanol and ethanol. Research using ethanol as the biodiesel feedstock to create fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) is currently largely lacking, in part due to the fact that absolute (dry) ethanol is required for the conventional basic catalytic process and its price is not economically competitive compared to that for methanol. Since hydrated ethanol has a lower price than absolute ethanol, it could make the FAEE based biodiesel production process more feasible and economically similar to that which uses methanol as feedstock for FAME production. Reduce the environmental and economic costs of biodiesel production by the SCA system, the addition of a suitable heterogeneous catalyst is an attractive idea
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