Abstract
Due to environmental and economic issues, alternative fuels have been developed as a way to achieve sustainability. Biodiesel is a biofuel substitute for petroleum diesel and has been produced mainly by the transesterification reaction, a process performed in two stages, chemical reaction, and product separation, which has several disadvantages. Biodiesel production considering an alternative method, by hydroesterification from fatty matter has many advantages, but available technology still requires distinct steps for reaction and separation. This chapter presents computational simulations of a multistep process of soybean oil biodiesel production by hydroesterification. The hydrolysis reaction (first step) uses a packed bed reactor and the esterification reaction (second step) utilizes a reactive distillation column, which combines the reaction and separation steps in the same piece of equipment. Several chemical processes employ this intensification technique but its application to esterification processes is recent. The simulation results show that the methodology used is consistent and sensitivity analysis suggest that conversions close to 99 % are possible.
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Aranda, D.A.G., Machado, G.D. (2016). Biodiesel Production by Hydroesterification: Simulation Studies. In: Soccol, C., Brar, S., Faulds, C., Ramos, L. (eds) Green Fuels Technology. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30205-8_13
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