Biofuels are a promising solution to society's quest for sustainable
energy. In the transportation sector, biodiesel is the leading alternative diesel
fuel currently in use today. However, the current global and domestic production
of biodiesel is far below the petro-diesel consumption and demand. To
increase the availability of biodiesel in the market, new methods of biodiesel
production must be developed to take advantage of the plentiful low quality
waste derived feed stocks that currently present problems to biodiesel
production using conventional methods. This research presents one new
approach based upon using heterogeneous highly cross linked mixed bed solid
phase catalysts to facilitate the production of biodiesel from feed stocks with
high concentrations of free fatty acids (FFA). The performance of the
heterogeneous mixed bed catalysts method developed in this research was
evaluated and optimized for catalyst concentration and reaction duration while
the mixing rate, reaction temperature, initial FFA composition of the feed stock
and the alcohol-to-oil molar ratio were kept constant.
The presented method reduces the FFA content of the starting feed
stock while limiting the release of water into the reaction. Through
experimentation, it was found that FFA removal with the mixed bed resin is due
to ion exchange with the quaternary ammonium functional group and not
catalysis to form esters. A model describing the heterogeneous processing method is presented. The outcome of this research is the development of a new
processing method that can be used to create biodiesel from poor quality raw
feed stock materials.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-08-6984 |
| Date | 2009 August 1900 |
| Creators | Jamal, Yousuf |
| Contributors | Boulanger, Bryan |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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