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NOVEL REACTOR DESIGN FOR BIODIESEL PRODUCTION
Description:
The goal of this project is to scale-up a novel reactor for producing Biodiesel from alternative feedstocks. Biodiesel is an alternative fuel that can be produced from a wide variety of plant oils, animal oils and waste oils from food processing. The conventional feedstocks for Biodiesel production are refined vegetable oils (triglycerides) produced by intensively-managed high-value food crops such as soybeans. The reactor being designed in this project is especially suited for low-value waste oils such as yellow grease and trap grease. Many waste oils and alternative plant oils contain a significant amount of Free Fatty Acids (FFA), which lead to excessive soap production and low conversion to Biodiesel using the conventional reactors. The novel reactor in this project uses acid catalysts that do not produce soaps and runs at higher temperatures that boil the methanol – so methanol bubbles rise through a column of oil and react with the oil to produce biodiesel. The bubbling methanol provides agitation and removes the by-product water enabling higher overall conversion to biodiesel. Our results show that this reactor is robust for converting oils to Biodiesel over the full range of FFA composition (from 100% triglycerides to 100% FFA).