Wahyu Widiantara – Widayati Purwaningsih

27 Desember 2011

Undergraduate students

Chemical Engineering Department,

Gadjah Mada University

Title:

 Preliminary-design of Biodiesel Plant from Palm Fatty Acid Distillate using Reactive Distillation

Outline:

Renewable energy has attracted more decades since depletion of petroleum-based fuel. Biodiesel, one of the renewable energy has been recognized as an interesting fuel that substituted diesel oil produced from petroleum. This plant use Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) which is a by-product from refining crude palm oil as raw material of biodiesel.

It is a light brown solid at room temperature, melting to a brown liquid on heating. The contain of PFAD are free fatty acid (FFA), about 85% and triglyceride (TG) about 15%. The use of PFAD as raw material of biodiesel has advantages: it can reduce the dependency of petroleum oil which leads to an increase oil prices and it can reduce the industrial waste.

The purpose of the present work is to design an efficient continuous process of biodiesel production using reactive distillation columns that combines the reaction and separation in a single equipment. This combined operation is especially suited for liquid phase reactions that must be carried out with a large excess of one reactant.

There are two step processes to produce biodiesel from PFAD. The first step of the process is esterification in which FFA reacts with methanol and acid catalyst to form fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) and water. The second step is transesterification process, in which triglyceride (TG) portion of the oil reacts with methanol and base catalyst to form ester and glycerol. The acid catalyst is generally sulfuric acid while the base catalyst is usually sodium or potassium hydroxide.

  Some equipments used are melter to melt PFAD, reactive distillation column as reaction and separation place, neutralizer to neutralize the residue of FFA and TG, washer to solute some salt formed, decanter to separate between light and heavy component, heat exchanger to adjust the temperature and another equipments.