Transesterification of soybean oil in four-way micromixers for biodiesel production using a cosolvent

• Soybean oil in presence of cosolvent changed to FAME in four-way micromixers.
• Three kinds of four-way micromixers with different confluence angles were employed.
• Hexane was added to the reaction system as a cosolvent for mass transfer intensification.
• Numerical optimization was used to reach the highest FAME content.
• In this continuous biodiesel production system, residence time reduced to 3–15 s.

In this work, transformation of soybean oil into fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) was studied in different four-way micromixers. Hexane was added to the reaction system as a cosolvent for mass transfer intensification. A three-level-five-factorial Central Composite Design using Response Surface Methodology was employed to optimize the reaction conditions. The main factors affecting the FAME content (wt.%) i.e. reaction temperature, residence time, hexane to methanol volumetric ratio, oil to methanol volumetric ratio and mixer configuration were discussed. The optimum combinations for transesterification to achieve a predicted maximum FAME of 97.67% were found. At this optimum condition, the observed FAME content was found to be 98.8%. The closeness of the experimental results and predicted values demonstrated that the regression model is significant. In the present work, residence time was reduced in an order of seconds (3–15 s), which it has not been fulfilled in the previous works.

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