Synthesis Of Biodiesel Fuel By Trickle Bed Reactor

At the present time, the global fuel deficiency and environmental degradation arebecoming more and more serious. So it's a severe problem for mankind to protect ournature and develop alternate fuel. Biodiesel fuel , which is also called liquid solarenergy, is made from reproducible oil, such as rape oil, soybean oil, waste oil fromrestaurants, and etc. Biodiesel fuel is a kind of substitute for diesel fuel with goodquality, as well as is friendly to environment. The application of biodiesel fuel hasgreat economic and social benefits. Although the present techniques are in shape, the cost should be reduced in orderto enlarge the application of biodiesel fuel. The present technique of biodiesel fuelproduction using stirrer reactor is power-consuming, time-consuming and has theproblem of badly contact status of reactants. The largest proportion of themanufacture cost is caused by the problems mentioned above. Trickle bed reactor,which could reduce the manufactural cost, was adopted to substitute BSTR. The pretreatment of lipid, the design of trickle bed reactor, the optimization ofthe new technique have been researched in this paper. The lipid was pretreated byalkali refining process and NaOH was used as the inactivator. The height of tricklebed was 36cm. The feed-in mode of reactants was cocurrent downflow. The optimumtechnology factors are: molar ratio of alcohol to oil(6:1), reaction temperature 63℃,amount of catalyst(0.8%), flux of lipin (0.26ml/min), flux of alcohol containing alkali(0.068ml/min). The yield rate of biodiesel fuel under this condition was 95.3%. Theprofit including tax of this technique was 631 yuan per ton, and compared that withthe technique using BSTR was 517 yuan per ton. So the new technique has increasedthe profit by 22%. Trickle bed reactor was firstly used in the alcoholysis reaction system. The newtechnique is good enough to be adopted in further research and application. - 1 -...