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Recent Articles in Thermodynamics

Optimization Of Biodiesel Production Plants, Nghi T. Nguyen University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Optimization Of Biodiesel Production Plants, Nghi T. Nguyen

Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Theses, Dissertations, & Student Research

A conventional biodiesel plant utilizing two distillation columns to purify unreacted reactants and products is considered in this study. Thermodynamic analyses are used to assess the performance of the existing distillation columns, and reduce the costs of operation by appropriate retrofits in a biodiesel production plant. After the retrofits, the overall exergy loss for the two columns has decreased from 2430.87 kW to 1674.12 kW.

A reactive distillation is developed for esterification of lauric acid with methanol using equilibrium and nonequilibrium models. Equilibrium modeling dominated during last few decades due to their straightforward mathematical modeling. In reality, separation ...