Simulation process of biodiesel production plant

Abstract

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.