19 replies to this topic

good day!

can anyone please help me find any publication or person or agency to contact for help on converting used cooking oil to biofuel. here are my email addresses: alvin.tortosa@up.edu.ph, kwikspyk11@yahoo.com

i hope to find help here because i am currently doing a research and designing a pilot plant for my internship.

thanx!

[Art Montemayor]

Alvin:

Welcome to the ChE Resources Forums.

I deleted your duplicated posting in the Refining Forum. Double or more postings of the same query are very confusing and only cause chaos and little, if any, positive results.

I hope you get positive responses from other students who may be interested or have had similar experiences.

Art Montemayor

[aluma]

Hi Lee,
There is lot on the net about biofuels; I particularly found this website useful during my final undergraduate project.
Feel free to contact me if you have specific difficulties.

hello aluma!

thanx for the help! i have just started my research and i have found some related topics on the net, i just need as many references as i can gather.
goodluck to you and take care!
thanx again!

[davsy]

Sorry if this reply is a bit late.
You would be best looking at the National biodiesel board website at www.nbb.org for some general information on Biodiesel and the standards involved etc.

If you are researching for a university project then you will be best staying away from the homebrew procedures. Be careful what you read on the "Journey to forever" website a lot of the information there has been discredited by peer review in other forum and it is basically a site which tells people how to make biodiesel in their back yard without any safety procedures or respect for the chemicals involved. The chemistry on that site has also been proven to be lacking, a lot of people who produce biodiesel using their methods are not concerned about quality of the finished product or even attaining a complete conversion.

Esterification and Transesterification are failry old unit operations and the conversion of Methyl Esters from vegetable oil has been used for many years by companies such as Procter and gamble for the surfactants and solvents industry.

If you want some fairly well respected information I suggest that you do a search on Jon van Gerpen he is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Uni of Idaho and has published lots of papers on Biodiesel. He did a lot of work when he was previously at Iowa State university (including a pilot plant) both have a lot of info on their web sites

Another good source of technical info is Gerhard Knothe who works at USDA and has completed lots of research into Biodiesel he also teaches a biodiesel workshop with Jon van Gerpen every year at either Ames or Idaho. Here is a link to some of his papershttp://www.lipidlibr...r/cvs/cv_GK.htm

Actually both van Gerpen and Knothe are co-authors in a Biodiesel handbook.

Do a google search on both names and you will get many usefullinks.

[TroyH]

some of the info here might be of use: http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve

hello davsy!

i used to frequently check this thread for positive response, and it's just now that i checked it again.

wow! thanks so much for the help! now, it is our topic for our plant design at school and i know it will really help us. thanks so much! take care!

thanx TroyH!

take care!

[Art Montemayor]

Maybe you can start off by visiting this website:

http://www.biodiesel.org/

[merac]

Hi aluma
I am a student od Chemical Engineering and I'm doing (finishing) my final degree project of the design of a biodiesel plant and I have a doubt related to the environmental impac evaluation

Question: What is it usually done with the free fatty acids that comes from the decanter (after the neutralisation reaction of soaps) in the glycerine purification section?


I don't know if these fatty acids are considered a waste or if they can be sold to another company, can you help me?

[davsy]

There are couple of options, firstly if you design the Biodiesel plant with an esterification pretreatment step you can gradually blend the FFA back into the feedstock and esterify them into Methyl Esters. Otherwise it would typically be disposed of either into some sort of boiler as a fuel or possibly supplied to a soap manufacturer.

we are actually doing something different to our design. we will be using ethanol instead of methanol and a heterogeneous catalyst to replace common homogeneous catalysts. the use of heterogeneous catalyst will reduce, if not eliminate, FFA.

[TroyH]

I am also designing a plant to use ethanol rather than methanol. I had considered heterogeneous catalysis, using anion exchange resins, but will most probably stick with base catalysed transesterification. What sized plants are you working on? I am working on 1ML p.a.

Perhaps one possible use for your waste FFA's is soapstock. The byproduct can be used directly as soap (usually requires some extra oil to be added, to consume the remaining catalyst). However acidifying the byproduct and collecting the FFA's might be more useful as you can on sell them, and don't have to worry about building a soap plant too.

I am currently looking at uses for my glycerol byproduct, as my feedstock does not contain very much free fatty acids.

I am also designing a plant to use ethanol rather than methanol. I had considered heterogeneous catalysis, using anion exchange resins, but will most probably stick with base catalysed transesterification. What sized plants are you working on? I am working on 1ML p.a.

Perhaps one possible use for your waste FFA's is soapstock. The byproduct can be used directly as soap (usually requires some extra oil to be added, to consume the remaining catalyst). However acidifying the byproduct and collecting the FFA's might be more useful as you can on sell them, and don't have to worry about building a soap plant too.

I am currently looking at uses for my glycerol byproduct, as my feedstock does not contain very much free fatty acids.

we are still at our initial steps in our plant design so we still don't know what our plant's size is.
we are eyeing at aluminum oxide as our catalyst.
the problem with ethanol is that it forms longer chains which affect the viscosity of biofuel produced. currently we are conducting an experiment to determine whether the viscosity of our biofuel will meet standards. if it won't, we will carry out an ozonation process to see if it can lower the viscosity.

one problem we are encountering, which we are presently researching on, is the removal of odor from our feedstock during pretreatment.

[davsy]

one problem we are encountering, which we are presently researching on, is the removal of odor from our feedstock during pretreatment.

forth lee

Traditionally the normal way to remove odor from the feedstock would be to run it through a Deodorizer, however to do this you will need to ensure the oil is degummed first as the phospholipids in the oil can degrade at high temperature and cause you problems with dark colors and potentially odors as well.

Deodorizing is typically a High temperature, vacuum stripping step. Anything upto 260C at 2mBara for upto one hour. This process basically removes the fatty acids and with them the odor compounds.

Hope that helps

[lactobacillus]

davsy:

did you test your untreated cooking oil by gas chromatography?

[TroyH]

currently we are conducting an experiment to determine whether the viscosity of our biofuel will meet standards.

I don't believe this is much of a problem, re: ethanol vs methanol. I would think that viscosity would be affected considerably more by your choice of oil feedstock (thus length of the FA chains).

Any idea what feedstock you are looking at using?

If you are using a feedstock that only just makes the viscosity spec when used to make methyl esters, THEN you might have a problem with ethyl esters, but if the methyl esters make fuel with a viscosity at the lower end of the spec, then I would suggest the ethyl esters will probably be in spec too. Pretty easy to test with small batches before you start anyhow.

currently we are conducting an experiment to determine whether the viscosity of our biofuel will meet standards.

I don't believe this is much of a problem, re: ethanol vs methanol. I would think that viscosity would be affected considerably more by your choice of oil feedstock (thus length of the FA chains).

Any idea what feedstock you are looking at using?

If you are using a feedstock that only just makes the viscosity spec when used to make methyl esters, THEN you might have a problem with ethyl esters, but if the methyl esters make fuel with a viscosity at the lower end of the spec, then I would suggest the ethyl esters will probably be in spec too. Pretty easy to test with small batches before you start anyhow.

hi! we are going to use used cooking oil and it still has to be pretreated before fed to the reactor. yes, we are conducting experiments whether ethyl esters' viscosity meet our country's standards.

one problem we are encountering, which we are presently researching on, is the removal of odor from our feedstock during pretreatment.

forth lee

Traditionally the normal way to remove odor from the feedstock would be to run it through a Deodorizer, however to do this you will need to ensure the oil is degummed first as the phospholipids in the oil can degrade at high temperature and cause you problems with dark colors and potentially odors as well.

Deodorizing is typically a High temperature, vacuum stripping step. Anything upto 260C at 2mBara for upto one hour. This process basically removes the fatty acids and with them the odor compounds.

Hope that helps

hi davsy! been away for a while.. i'm sorry but can you expound on "degumming?" what does it do and how is it done?

on deodorizing: does it affect the other components of the oil or just removes the fatty acids & odor compounds?
one thing we thought of for the removal of odor is the use of activated carbon after filtering out the solids. are there other simpler processes you know regarding odor removal?

another thing, do you know anything about using (gamma)aluminum oxide as heterogeneous catalyst, or any other heterogeneous catalyst? we have a vague idea how this one works and how to remove or separate it from our product streams...

thanks! (^^,)

Hi aluma
I am a student od Chemical Engineering and I'm doing (finishing) my final degree project of the design of a biodiesel plant and I have a doubt related to the environmental impac evaluation

Question: What is it usually done with the free fatty acids that comes from the decanter (after the neutralisation reaction of soaps) in the glycerine purification section?


I don't know if these fatty acids are considered a waste or if they can be sold to another company, can you help me?

hi merac!
you're designing a plant tackling waste cooking oil? did you consider odor treatment in your design? if you did, what specifically is the process you incorporated?

thanks!