Determination of the Best Conditions for Continuous Production of Biodiesel in the Plug Flow Reactor Containing a Static Mixer and Optimization of Parameters by Taguchi Experimental Design Method

Reduction in the oil reserves’ levels, the variation of fossil fuel prices and GHG have led to grow the value of attention to biodiesel. Reserves of fossil fuels are running out and should have proper alternative for them. Environmental benign and renewable properties of biodiesel make it consider suitable candidate to replace fossil fuels. In this study, continuous production of biodiesel and optimization of important and influential parameters have been investigated. The method was concluded of trans-esterification of soya oil with methanol as feed in presence of homogeneous catalyst of NaOH. A plug flow reactor containing a static mixer with high efficiency, low cost and controllable operating conditions was used. The reactor was designed as it used the combination of advantages other reactors to achieve %94.72 conversion at 1.61minute. Four factors including; (1) the methanol/oil molar ratio, (2) flow rate of feed, (3) the reaction temperature and (4) the catalyst percent in 3-level were optimized by Taguchi experimental design. The optimized conversion point which was obtained by ANOVA method at %98.53 was converted to 98.02% after merging the temperature factor.