Performance Analyses of Fatty Acids in Reactive Distillation Process for Biodiesel Production

GIWA, Abdulwahab and BELLO, Alhassan and GIWA, Saidat Olanipekun (2014) Performance Analyses of Fatty Acids in Reactive Distillation Process for Biodiesel Production. Performance Analyses of Fatty Acids in Reactive Distillation Process for Biodiesel Production, 5 (12). pp. 1-13. ISSN 2229-5518

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Abstract

Different materials are used for biodiesel production via esterification or transesterification processes. In esterification reaction, an organic acid is reacted with an alcohol to produce an ester (biodiesel) and water (by-product). It then implies that the fatty acid used determines the type and the purity of the biodiesel obtained. As such, the performances of the fatty acids available and used for biodiesel production are not, of course, likely to be the same. So, it is good to have some knowledge about the performances of the fatty acids available for biodiesel production so as to know the type of a fatty acid to choose for the production of a particular biodiesel product at any time. Therefore, this work has been carried out to investigate the performances of some fatty acids used for the production of biodiesel using reactive distillation column. The fatty acids considered were oleic acid, which was discovered, according to Kusmiyati and Sugiharto (2010), to give biodiesel that had the quality required to be a diesel substitute, and some other ones (stearic acid, linoleic acid and palmitic acid) found to be present in jatropha oil. Methanol was used as the alcohol of the reaction. The study was carried out with the aid of Aspen HYSYS that was used to develop the model of the reactive distillation column in which both the reaction for biodiesel production and the separation of the unreacted materials and by-products were simultaneously carried out. The results obtained from the study revealed that, among the fatty acids investigated, the one with the highest performance was palmitic acid because it was able to give the biodiesel with the highest mole fraction of 0.8358.

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