A novel design for biodiesel production from methanol + mutton bone fat mixture.

Bioenergy plays a significant role in the green transition. In this work, the conversion of methanol and mutton bone fat oil (as a low-cost feedstock) for bioenergy production was studied. The five-level, three-factor response surface methodology (RSM) was used to optimize the transesterification reaction conditions for produced biodiesel. Twenty ultrasonic-assisted experiments at the frequency of 25 kHz were conducted to investigate the effects of methanol/oil molar ratio (M/O) and concentrations of KOH and NaOH as catalysts on biodiesel yield. A second-order polynomial equation was developed by fitting the RSM experimental data using Design-Expert software. Results showed that the optimum biodiesel yield of 90.087% could be achieved by the KOH catalyst with 2.5 wt% concentration and 15:1 M/O during 3 h of the reaction. Furthermore, the biofuel analyses showed that methanol and mutton bone fat oil can be used as a proper feedstock for biofuel production. In the following, a membrane filtration package system is proposed and modeled. The reaction kinetics was determined based on experimental data. The results of the mathematical modeling showed the reaction time appears to be 6 times shorter in a membrane setup (30 min). Consequently, membrane application is highly recommended for biodiesel production from mutton bone fat oil.

An On-Board Pure H2 Supply System Based on A Membrane Reactor for A Fuel Cell Vehicle: A Theoretical Study.

In this novel conceptual fuel cell vehicle (FCV), an on-board CH4 steam reforming (MSR) membrane reformer (MR) is considered to generate pure H2 for supplying a Fuel Cell (FC) system, as an alternative to the conventional automobile engines. Two on-board tanks are forecast to store CH4 and water, useful for feeding both a combustion chamber (designed to provide the heat required by the system) and a multi tubes Pd-Ag MR useful to generate pure H2 via methane steam reforming (MSR) reaction. The pure H2 stream is hence supplied to the FC. The flue gas stream coming out from the combustion chamber is used to preheat the MR feed stream by two heat exchangers and one evaporator. Then, this theoretical work demonstrates by a 1-D model the feasibility of the MR based system in order to generate 5 kg/day of pure H2 required by the FC system for cruising a vehicle for around 500 km. The calculated CH4 and water consumptions were 50 and 70 kg, respectively, per 1 kg of pure H2. The on-board MR based FCV presents lower CO2 emission rates than a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle, also resulting in a more environmentally friendly solution.

Experimental and theoretical study of crude oil pretreatment using low-frequency ultrasonic waves.

In this work, an ultrasound experimental setup was designed to investigate the feasibility of using low-frequency ultrasonic waves as a substitute to reduce the consumption of chemical demulsifiers in the pretreatment of crude oil. The experiments were planned to study the effects of irradiation time, ultrasonic field intensity and initial water content on the efficiency of separation. The results of experiments showed that by selecting a proper irradiation time and field intensity, it is possible to decrease the usage of demulsifiers by 50%. Moreover, a population balance model was proposed to explicate the experimental data. A hybrid coalescence model was developed to determine the frequency of aggregation. The parameters of the model were estimated by linear regression. The parameter estimation was performed using a parallel execution of the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The results of the model showed a decent agreement with the experimental data.