Investigation of Liquid- Liquid Two-Phase Flow Pattern in Microreactors for Biodiesel Production

In the present study, transesterification of soybean oil to Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) was carried out in the microreactor. The system performance was investigated in the presence of hexane as a cosolvent. Furthermore, the effect of number of micromixer’s inlets on the mixing was one of the objectives in this work. For the goals mentioned above, three different experiments were done with and without cosolvent in two and three inlet micromixers under optimum conditions. Both flow pattern observations and Gas Chromatgoraphy (GC) characterization of FAME samples demonstrated that cosolvent technique and micromixer application could significantly influence the FAME yield in biodiesel production.