Biodiesel production in supercritical conditions

The output of biodiesel in our country couldn?t turn out to be quite a good performance, asexpected, due to the deficity of the vegetable oil resources and the arbitrary constraintsimposed on the method of transesterification. For that reason; the contributions that the resultsmade to the product?s characteristics were investigated according to the experimental designby using two different production technologies and different vegetable oil resources. Thetransesterification experiments were examined using methanol at 65 C. Parameters selectedwere the kinds of oils and catalysts, agitation time, volumetric ratio of alcohol to oil andamount of catalyst, and investigated at 5 levels (-2, -1, 0, 1 and 2), and coded as x1, x2, x3, x4and x5. Moreover, the economical contribution to neutralization step depending on pH-metercontroller was obtained considering quality of the products. The production of biodiesel insupercritical alcohol, which is considered as a flow process in the world for the first time, wasinvestigated including the parameters of the kind of the oil, pressure, temperature and alcohol-oil molar rate at 5 levels. The reaction was completed within 7.2-9.2 minutes. The biodieselsamples were characterized by using GC, conversion was over percentage of 99, and theamount of glycerin was negligible. The results have shown that the supercritical alcoholtechnology, which has an extremely high conversion in shorter reaction time, will present aneconomical production technology via national oil resources because it does not need tofurther purification step and pre- or post treatments.Keywords: biodiesel, vegetable oil, experimental design, supercritical alcohol, flow system,transesterification