Simulation process of biodiesel production plant

Abstract

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.

Comprehensive Techno-Economic Analysis of a Multi-Feedstock Biorefinery Plant in Oil-Rich Country: A Case Study of Iran

“…where 1), the amount of WOF produced in 2019 is estimated to be 507,800.93 tons. Given the conversion efficiency of edible waste oil to biodiesel through the process of transesterification is 98% [25], and regarding Equation (1), produced biodiesel from edible waste oil is calculated 497.6 Mt (565.51 million liters). Figure 2 presents the production rate of biodiesel from edible waste oils for provinces with a population of more than two million.…”

“…In this part of the supercritical two-stage technique, methanol was used without a catalyst to produce biodiesel from WCO. The scheme of the mentioned plant has been depicted in Figure 7 [25]. Salehi et al [25] used RK-ASPEN thermodynamic model to determine the coefficients of the material activity in the liquid phase.…”

Multi-objective bat optimization for a biomass gasifier integrated energy system based on 4E analyses

“…High capacity to facilitate monetary calculation and economic report are as most unique features of the mentioned software. The remarkable flexibility, minuscule error and its accuracy in the economic sensitivity evaluations can be considered as other superb features of the COMFAR III [58]. Owning to the following assumptions, the economic evaluations for the suggested plant were carried out:…”

Magnetic mesoporous KOH/Fe3O4@MCM‐41 nanocatalyst for biodiesel production from waste cooking oil: Optimization of process variables and kinetics study

“…The transesterification process can be carried out by alkalicatalysis, acid-catalysis, enzyme-catalysis, non-catalysis, homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysis techniques. [9][10][11][12][13] Between these approaches, the use of heterogeneous catalysts is desirable due to the lower cost of separation and recovery compared to homogeneous catalysts and being non-corrosive for the equipment compared to the alkaline catalyst, it also does not lead to the formation of by-product. 14 Furthermore, heterogeneous catalysts do not involve soap formation, which results in loss of glyceride molecules, and can be recovered from the reaction medium and reused, conveniently.…”