A simple device to test biodiesel process intensification

In this paper, we have studied the KOH catalyzed transesterification reaction of vegetable oil with methanol in a tubular reactor filled with small spheres of stainless steel of different sizes. Three different packed bed configurations have been tested corresponding to different fluid dynamic situations. The first configuration corresponds to the tubular reactor filled with spheres of 2.5 mm of diameters; in the second configuration an opportune amount of spheres of 1 mm has been added to the mentioned spheres of 2.5 mm for filling the void volume of the octahedral cavities between the bigger spheres; in the third configuration an opportune amount of spheres of 0.39 mm has been added to spheres of 2.5 mm for filling the void volume of the tetrahedral cavities between the bigger spheres. The three mentioned configurations give place to the formation of micro-channels with an approximated size of respectively 1000 μm, 500 μm and 300 μm. These systems, subjected to fluid dynamic characterization, have shown a very high local turbulence (static mixer), in particular, when a packed bed reactor with dual size packing is used. Then, kinetic transesterification runs have been made by using the three mentioned packed bed reactors and a very high productivity has been obtained as a consequence of the induced local micro-mixing. A simplified kinetic model has been developed, which is able to describe many runs in batch conditions reported by the literature. This model resulted unsuitable to simulate the continuous runs performed in the described packed bed reactors. Our conclusion is that monophasic models, often proposed in the literature, are not able to describe the kinetic behavior of KOH catalysed transesterification in microchannels devices. At last, the described microchannels device represents, as it will be discussed, an ideal connection between a traditional tubular packed bed reactor and the recently appeared microreactors that are very efficient in mass and energy transfer operations for process intensification.