Ultrasonication can improve the conversion processing of vegetable oils or animal fats to biodiesel by improved mixing and enhanced chemical activity
The manufacturing of biodiesel from oils (eg soy, canola, sunflower seed) or animal fats, involves the base-catalysed transesterification of fatty acids with methanol to give the corresponding methyl esters.
The conventional esterification reaction in batch processing tends to be slow, and phase separation of the glycerol is time-consuming.
Ultrasound allows for the inline processing.
Ultrasonication can achieve a biodiesel yield in excess of 99%.
Ultrasound reduces the processing time from the conventional one to five- hour batch processing to less than five minutes.
Ultrasonication can also help to reduce the separation time from five to ten hours (using conventional agitation) to less than 15min using ultrasound.
The biodiesel processing does not need much ultrasonic energy.
Hielscher is supplies industrial ultrasonic processing systems, worldwide.
With ultrasonic processors of up to 16kW power per single device, there is no limit in plant size or processing capacity.
Costs of ultrasonication.
The resulting costs for the ultrasonication vary between US$0.002 and $0.015 per litre when used in commercial scale.
