Jon Van Gerpen: Looking at the Biodiesel Process in a New Way
by Ron Kotrba (Biodiesel Magazine) “There are a lot of things we don’t know about the biodiesel process.” This is not a comment expected from one of the most knowledgeable researchers in the biodiesel industry, Prof. Jon Van Gerpen of the University of Idaho. But Van Gerpen, who gave the closing presentation at the Collective Biofuels Conference, said biodiesel production is a “deceptively simple process.”
He said the industry can learn from stepping back and looking at the production process in a new, microscopic way, and brought up questions that perhaps should have been asked back when biodiesel was in its infancy. These questions include, “What affects the reaction, and why?” and “Can we guide the reaction in some way?”
…He said the biodiesel transesterification process is conventionally referred to as a mass transfer limited reaction, but really it could be chemical reaction limited. “We usually don’t know which,” he said. “There’s a balance between the relative significance of diffusion and reaction.”
Van Gerpen said he is working to develop mathematical equations to address this. “Diffusion we can do,” he said, “but the piece we’re missing is we don’t know what the chemical reaction rate is in the droplets.” READ MORE
