Exergy Analysis of Palm Oil Biodiesel Production

The global search for cleaner energy sources has motivated the development of fuels from oil crops (soybean, sunflower, rapeseed, castor, coconut, palm, etc.), with special importance of biodiesel from African Palm, due to its high yields (5900 l/ha) and decrease of emissions of vehicles (mainly carbon monoxide and volatile hydrocarbons). One of the most important disadvantages of biodiesel is a lower energy output than fossil fuels and consequently requires greater quantities of energy to be consumed in order to produce the same energy unit. To evaluate the efficiency of biodiesel production from palm oil in this work the methodology of exergy analysis was applied. In this case biodiesel production process includes tree steps: 1. the pre-treatment performed to hydrolyze triglycerides presented in palm oil, 2. the esterification to fatty acids using sulfuric acid as catalyst, 3 the separation and purification stage. To evaluate the energetic and exergetic efficiency at each stage of the process the thermodynamic analysis was applied, and was found that the largest exergy losses were occasioned by absence of energy flows integration. Additionally, the methodology developed in this work could be employed as a tool to achieve more efficient use of energy in the biofuel industry, also as an instrument for comparison to other biodiesel production processes from renewable resources (soybean, castor, etc.). This work was supported by the Ibero-American Program on Science and Technology for Development (CYTED) project 306RTO279 "New technologies for biofuels production" UNESCO codes 330303, 332205, 530603, 330999 and the Colombian Department of Science, Technology and Innovation COLCIENCIAS, projects CT 475-2007 and CT 272-2008.)