Biodiesel Production by an Integrated Reactive Separation System: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The aim of this work is to present an efficient process using a reactive distillation column applied to biodiesel production. Reactive distillation is characterized by simultaneous implementation of reaction and separation within a single column. In this work, the biodiesel production from soybean oil with ethanol in presence of sodium hydroxide as catalyst was studied in a tray column. The experimental design applied was a full 22 factorial design with three central points. Two independent variables in twolevels were selected for this study: substrate molar ratio (ethanol:soybean oil) and catalyst concentration and one variable dependent was considered, the response selected was the ethyl ester conversion. The process simulation was performed using the commercial simulator Aspen Plus® 7.2. The simulation results showed a good agreement with experimental results and it can be seen that conversions above 99.84 % of ethyl esters could be achieved.