Engineering Commons^™

Investigations Of Transesterification Of Canola Oil With Methanol And Ethanol For A New Efficient Method Of Biodiesel Production, Krupal Pal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Transesterification of vegetable oil to biodiesel is a multistep process affected by mass transfer, mixing and chemical reaction equilibrium. Attempts have been made in this study to overcome these limitations by gradually feeding oil into a pool of alcohol. This approach provided large excess of alcohol to allow reaction to proceed further as well as allowed easy dispersion of oil into the alcohol. As a result improved conversion of feed, higher yield and better product quality were achieved. Comparisons have been made with other methods to show the differences and highlight improvements. Reactions were conducted at various reaction conditions for …

Photocatalytic Degradation Of Phenolic Compounds In Water: Irradiation And Kinetic Modeling, Jesus Moreira Del Rio

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Scaling up a photoreactor requires both knowledge of optical properties of the slurry medium and an established kinetic model. Measuring the scattering and absorption coefficients of particles suspended in water involves the use of specialized optical equipment, as well as the partial solution of the radiative transfer equation (RTE). In addition, modeling of the radiation field in photoreactors with complicated geometries offers special challenges.

On the other hand, most of the kinetic models (KM) for phenol photodegradation reported in the literature were obtained for a single organic chemical species only. In fact, neglecting all the intermediate species generated during the …

Supercritical Water Gasification Of Biomass & Biomass Model Compounds, Emhemmed A.E.A Youssef

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Supercritical water gasification (SCWG) is an innovative, modern, and effective destruction process for the treatment of organic compounds. Hydrogen production using SCWG of biomass or waste feedstocks is a promising approach towards cleaner fuel production while simultaneously providing novel solution for hard-to-treat organic wastes. The main premise of this work was to experimentally examine real waste biomass sources i.e. hog manure and waste biomass model compounds using SCW gasification while examining various commercial catalysts. The improvement of the SCWG process requires an understanding of the waste/biomass reaction chemistry, and thus the knowledge of the reaction mechanisms is critically important for …