Biodiesel via supercritical ethanolysis within a global analysis “feedstocks-conversion-engine” for a sustainable fuel alternative

A review of the combustion and emissions properties of advanced transportation biofuels and their impact on existing and future engines

“…FAME biodiesels obtained from non-food crops, such as jatropha, camelina or algae, will have similar combustion and emissions characteristics as first-generation FAME biodiesels with similar fuel compositions, including the hydrocarbon chain lengths and saturation levels of the constituent mix of esters. It has been suggested that the environmental footprint of biodiesel production can be improved if bioethanol is used to transesterify the triglycerides of the oils to produce fatty-acid ethyl esters [8,9], but there could be an associated increase in fuel-production costs. FAME biodiesels have cetane numbers between 48 and 65 [85,241].…”

“…Traditionally, methanol has been used during the trans-esterification reaction producing fattyacid methyl esters (FAME), but ethanol or propanol have been suggested for improving the cold-flow performance of biodiesel fuels [6,7], and use of bioethanol can improve the sustainability of the resulting biodiesel [8,9], but this may come with associated cost increases.…”

Phase equilibrium data and modeling of ethylic biodiesel, with application to a non-edible vegetable oil

“…For a rational design and operation of biodiesel production processes, it is essential to have quantitative and reliable information about the vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) and liquid-liquid equilibrium of mixtures containing alcohols, fatty acid esters or glycerol. However, experimental data for many of theses systems is still missing [2]. In 2014 the extended review by Coniglio et al [2] highlighted the great lack of data, while in the work by Cunico et al [3], from the same year, a comprehensive application of thermodynamic consistency tests for VLE over systems containing the main classes of compounds present in the biodiesel production, showed that only 3% of the data sets had quality factors higher than 0.5 (maximum is 1.0) [3].…”

“…These works [2,3] strongly suggested the need of more precise and consistent measurements that can be used to test and develop models for the design and operation of the biodiesel production processes. Among those, conventional excess Gibbs energy models such as Wilson, NRTL, and UNIQUAC equations, group-contribution approaches of the UNIFAC family, but also equations of state (EoS) like CPA, Peng-Robinson, SAFT have been applied [2,4,5], but further developments are still needed.…”

“…Among those, conventional excess Gibbs energy models such as Wilson, NRTL, and UNIQUAC equations, group-contribution approaches of the UNIFAC family, but also equations of state (EoS) like CPA, Peng-Robinson, SAFT have been applied [2,4,5], but further developments are still needed. In particular, due to the real competition of edible oils for human nutrition, non-edible vegetable oils (NEVO) are becoming one of the leading raw materials for biodiesel production, for which fundamental and application studies are extremely necessary.…”