Farm Futures is reporting that researchers at Oregon State University have announced a new micro-scale highly efficient vegetable oil to biodiesel converter.
Here's a short overview of the "standard" biodiesel process, thanks to Boulder Biodiesel:
Vegetable oil is a tri-glyceride, that's three oil molecules, or esters, attached to one molecule of glycerin. Glycerin is what makes vegetable oil thick and sticky. To make biodiesel, we want to remove the glycerin and replace it with an alcohol. This is the process of transestrification. The alcohol we use is methanol.
To initiate the biodiesel reaction, we need a catalyst. Vegetable oil is an acid, so to 'break' the vegetable oil molecule, we add a strong base. For this we use Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) also known as lye.
The reaction is done in a batch reactor and takes a long time (12~24 hours). The glycerin from the vegetable oil is then separated out and can be used to make other products, such as soap, but first the catalyst in it must be neutralized and removed using hydrochloric acid, a tedious and costly process.
The new process developed at Oregon State uses a micro reactor that's only a few inches on a side. The vegetable oil and alcohol are forced through tiny microchannels where the biodiesel reaction occurs almost instantaneously, without a catalyst. While each microreactor is tiny and only produces a small amount of fuel, they can be stacked in parallel for higher volumes. If the new technology works, it can drastically change the economics of biodiesel production, and can make small scale production feasible.
Scaling new developments like this from the lab into large volume, reliable, economic production systems is always a challenge. It will be interesting to see how they overcome "real world" difficulties (microchannels plugged up by impurities etc..).
Biodiesel Breakthrough?
