Optimization of the process of obtaining biodiesel from a production company, through simulation

Abstract

Ecuador has been cataloged as one of the countries with the potential to venture into biodiesel production in Latin America, using approximately 200 hectares for the generation of Jatropha curcas oil; however, the amount of the produced oil it is not enough to satisfy the demand of the Ecuadorian market. This paper presents the optimization of the biodiesel production process from Jatropha curcas in 

an Ecuadorian pilot plant through the evaluation of improvements applied by simulation. For this, the information was collected from the operational data, mass and energy balances were made and the main variables such as: temperature, reaction time, alcohol: vegetable oil molar ratio, use of homogeneous and heterogeneous, catalysts and their concentration, mixing intensity and humidity control, were optimized in the commercial package SuperPro Designer v.9.5 to validate the information. The result was an increase in the efficiency of the process of obtaining biodiesel from the company from 85% to 91% in volume, which were scaled taking into account the local production of the specie and the results obtained showed that it can be fulfill with 25% of the objective proposed by the current government to obtain 10 (millions) MM liters of biodiesel from the large scale plant.