Introduction When you want to start contributing to a better environment or lower your operational costs (transportation companies, or any other fleet owner) or simply start and interesting business (produce and market Biodiesel on your local market), Biodiesel is a competitive product, although that depending on national legislation, since, for now, the product is only competitive if tax breaks are applies or other forms of subsidies.
Biodiesel production technology development is in its early stage. The production process itself is not complex, on a small scale. On a larger, industrial scale, demanding constant quality of the end-product and control on production costs, the engineering, construction and operation of an efficient and effective production unit, is not that simple.
Sunergy can help you to define which technology to apply, to design the production unit and to implement it on a turn key basis, until the training of your staff and even to find cheap feedstock. You will be involved in each step so you will acquire necessary knowledge and experience to be able to successfully operate your own production unit. Equipment
In this section, we describe, using an example, a set of equipment components that, integrated in a production environment configuration, will allow you to produce approximately 2000 litres of clean Biodiesel per hour. Based on a 8 hours working day and 225 working days per year, you will be able to produce 3,6 million litres of Biodiesel per year, considering holiday breaks in production. By using an example, you will find it easier to get an idea of what is involved in engineering and implementing a production unit. Nevertheless it is an example, and each project is unique. We can provide you a unit from 400 litres per hour with settling tanks to a unit of 5000 litres per hour, with Biodiesel dry washing, resin filtering, centrifuges etc.
The example - production flow diagram includes the most important settling and filtering equipment that will allow you to clean and polish the fuel to be able to meet the EN14214 standard, or any other.
Our production is based on the use of vegetable oils (used or virgin). This means you can use used oils as a feedstock but they need to be pre-treated to meet the minimum feedstock standards described in our example. Sunergy delivers complete used oils cleaning units.
Indeed, this is a quality requisite for any production equipment. We call this the garbage in, garbage out principle; if feedstock does not meet the standards when entering the process as we defined it, end products will not meet the standards defined by regulators.
The production process is also based on the mixing of Methanol and Sodium separately and is injected in the reactor with the pre-heated oils. It is however possible, and will help improve final product quality, to use pre-mixed sodium methoxide (anhydrous – sodium methylate). Since water is a fuel contaminant, you do not want it to be in touch with either feedstock, nor with the end product or anywhere in between. Production processes of Sunergy do NOT require water.
Reactors
The FB400 and FB800 reactor is produced in England by EuroFueltech, its most important feature being to work under a novel, high quality production protocol – the High Temperature and Pressure (HTP) protocol. Its main advantage is the faster processing time and more complete reactions. The primary trans-esterification process is conducted under a final working temperature between 85 and 90 ºC and a pressure of 2,5 ATM (absolute pressure). The reactors were specifically designed for these working conditions.
Our biodiesel reactors are made of high quality steel with safety in mind. Our conversion ratios are regularly over 98.5%. Heating elements have thermal protection, and mixing is assured via a proprietary static mixing system which ensures much higher homogeneity and reagent contact that simple mixing, which oftentimes results in the existence of un-reacted “oil channels” within the reactor. 
Centrifuge
For the best end-result without complex and time consuming slow filtering processes, we advise our clients to centrifuge the Oil after reaction. This allows you a much more efficient production process and better quality assurance.
Resin based filtering Also, we recommend apply an acid neutralization step on the Bio diesel and the dry-washing of the fuel through a absorption/filtering process, to avoid ions/salts, Free Fatty Acids (FFA’s), glycerol and other contaminants. Acid neutralization is important to guarantee that the reaction stops after separation from Glycerine – that is, that no more glycerine will form after separation of Biodiesel.
Methanol recovering and pre-heating of feedstock
Sunergy went further in optimizing process units; we integrate the use of energy in a way that, comparing to traditional production units, you will recover 95% of your methanol excess, and reduce with 45% energy consumption due to its energy integration systems. 
This picture shows a Methanol recovery, pre-heating and mixing unit that has the capacity to recover methanol for a production capacity of 5000 tons of Biodiesel per year.
Laboratory
Analysing your Bio diesel product is a very important step in the production process. It starts with the control over the feedstock quality and ends with the control over fuel quality in transportation or storage means. The following will show you what specific quality aspects you need to measure to be able to analyse if you produced a reasonable Bio diesel or not
FFA - Free Fatty acid - the FFA’s is one of the parameters most important to control. In the presence of a basic environment the FFA’s form soap; soap combustion produces ashes deposits in the interior of the engine. The FFA text can be determined through the acidity number, which consists in the amount of milligrams of potassium hydroxide necessary to add to one gram of sample in form to neutralize its acidity. In the absence of other acid forms, this value will directly be related with the existing fraction of FFA in the sample. Oxidative stability- this parameter measures the stability of the degradation that one determined oil has, which in turn it will reflect directly the stability your produced biodiesel will have. The oxidative stability is directly related with the amounts of existing double linking’s in the chains of fatty acid, and the more instauration they have, the most unstable they will be. SAP - value of saponification is the amount of an alkaline base necessary to saponificate one definitive amount of sample. It is normally express as the number of milligrams of potassium, hydroxide (KOH) necessary to saponificate 1 gram of sample. Knowing the value is important because it will show you the sensitivity of your oil to soap formation. Iodine index- the iodine index is a measure of saturation, being expressed in terms of centigrams of iodine (I2) absorbed by 1 gram of sample. This parameter is of particular importance because of the relation that exists between the index of saturation and the formation of NOx in the emission gases. With very high iodine indices, the combustion of biodiesel will create polymer formation in the engine. Cetane Number: the number of cetano consists in a scale to determine with which speed a fuel enters in ignition in an engine diesel. Although an engine diesel always will function with a lower cetane number than for which it was designed, low cetane numbers provoke engine starting difficulties and it will operate worst. Cloud Point- the cloud point corresponds to the temperature in which solids are formed. This value is of extreme importance since it determines the temperature range in which your fuel will perform well, with additives. Flash Point- Temperature to which the vapours enter in combustion when ignited with a spark. Sunergy is able to provide you quick lab results from tests done on your Biodiesel or vegetable oils, and the costs are low. |
