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›› 2011, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (4): 11-16.

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Refinery Operation Optimization for Purification of Biodiesel Product by Alkaline-catalyzed Process

GUO Yan, CHEN Fu-ming   

  1. Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, Shenzhen 518057, China
  • Received:2011-01-27 Revised:1900-01-01 Online:2011-07-30 Published:2011-07-30

Abstract: Biodiesel products were produced by alkaline-catalyzed transesterification from crude oil of Jatropha curcas seeds, food waste oil and foodgrade corn oil, respectively. Some parameters of traditional purification operations, such as surplus methanol removal efficiency, separation effect of crude ester from glycerol, etc. were evaluated, improved and optimized. The results showed that the separation time was decreased from 6 h to 40 min and the same product yield of 88.0% was obtained using centrifugal separation of crude ester from glycerol comparing with settling method. De-methanoling as the first step for biodiesel product purification was favorable on increment of methanol recovery rate and decrement of equipment costs of industrial scale production lines. It is worth to recommend that water washing method, using glacial acetic acid of 0.2% (mass fraction) on basis of products and then adding warm water of 60℃, could break the stable emulsion quickly, and water washing efficiency was improved remarkably. As the benefits achieved, not only washing time was shortened significantly, but also water consumption decreased due to washing frequencies reduced. For the food waste oil, an additional ester distillation column should be applied so that the biodiesel product with higher level ester content (96.5%), could be obtained.

Key words: biodiesel, purification of biodiesel, separation of ester from glycerol, water washing

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