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Simulation process of biodiesel production plant
Author(s) -
Salehi Abozar,
Karbassi Abdolreza,
Ghobadian Barat,
Ghasemi Amir,
Doustgani Amir
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
environmental progress and sustainable energy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.495
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1944-7450
pISSN - 1944-7442
DOI - 10.1002/ep.13264
Subject(s) - biodiesel , supercritical fluid , biodiesel production , methanol , pulp and paper industry , environmental science , waste management , biofuel , process (computing) , process engineering , chemistry , catalysis , engineering , organic chemistry , computer science , operating system
The increasing global demands for fossil fuels have resulted in the release of large quantity of pollutants and reduction of the available resources. Owing to this fact, alternatives to fossil fuels, like biodiesel, are essential for the survival of the existing resources and the decrease of environmental contamination. In the current study, the technical assessment of five continuous biodiesel production processes was designed and simulated with the Aspen Plus v8.6 software. In order to convert virgin vegetable oil (VVO) as well as waste cooking oil (WCO) to biodiesel, alkali‐catalyzed and acid‐catalyzed processes were utilized in the first three processes. In the fourth and fifth processes, the two‐step supercritical methanol method (noncatalytic) and the acid‐catalyzed process were adopted by hexane extraction to transform the WCO to biodiesel. According to the technical assessment, the two‐step supercritical methanol process has the lowest number of operating units; however, it has the lowest purity of FAME (98.47%). The highest purity of glycerol (99.98%) and FAME (99.7%) belong to Processes 3 and 1, respectively. As a result, the homogeneous acid catalytic process of WCO and the two‐step supercritical methanol process are the best choices in terms of technical evaluation among all the examined processes.