Estudo experimental, simulação e modelagem do efeito de agitação e mistura no processo da produção de biodiesel de soja (Glycine max) metílico e etílico.

Abstract

The consumption of fuels derived from petroleum increases every year, resulting in increased air pollution. Because of this the world economy needs alternative sources of energy. Biodiesel exists as an alternative to diesel. Biodiesel can be obtained from the transesterification reaction in which the triglycerides present in vegetable oils or animal fats react with short chain alcohol in the presence of a catalyst to obtain the fatty acid esters. In this work the kinetics of the reaction of transesterification of soybean oil with methanol and with ethanol in the presence of sodium hydroxide to produce biodiesel was found. For the methyl biodiesel the kinetics was of first order and for the ethyl the kinetics was of second order. These kinetic data were used to simulate the reactions. The CFD computational fluid dynamics technique allows in-depth and detailed study, including velocity and pressure field analyzes, without the need for advanced experimental analysis techniques or financial costs for pilot plant assembly. This technique is mainly developed in commercial packages such as Ansys, which offers several graphical interfaces and models. In this work the geometry and the mesh were created for the tank with the different impellers and the conditions of the reaction were inserted to find the results. The k-ε turbulence model was used, kinetics was considered first-order for methanol and second-order for ethanol and the system considered single-phase and multicomponent. The simulation for the ethanol was not satisfactory, since the simulated mass fractions did not have the behavior similar to the experimental one. As for the reactions with methanol, the mass fractions obtained by the simulation were very close to those found experimentally, showing that the simulation was satisfactory.