Continuous production of biodiesel in a continuous reactor with minimal

Abstract

The yield of biodiesel from a base catalyzed transesterification in a batch system is generally low due to the reversed reaction. In addition, the process tends to generate high amount of waste water in the washing step. In order to overcome the above problems, a continuous process was adopted in this study. Solid alum was used to stop the reaction and filtered off from the biodiesel products. The results showed that, biodiesel production from palm oil in a 2.8 liter continuous reactor filled with stainless steel wool acted as a static mixer gave biodiesel of 99.6% purity in 10 minutes, at the flow rate of 280 milliliter per minutes. KOH was used as the reaction catalyst at a concentration of 0.75%, based on ethanol. The molar ratio of ethanol to oil was 9:1. Three hundred and fifty gram of alum could satisfactorily neutralize one liter of biodiesel.