Biodiesel Processes Energy Improvement based on Pinch and Exergy Analysis

Abstract

With the growth of energy demands and depleting fossil fuel reserves, there is an increasing incentive to improve an energy efficiency of industrial processes. This project aims to develop energy improvement methodologies containing both Pinch and exergy Analysis in an iterative manner, and identify promising modifications that can be applied on industrial scale processes to improve process energy performance across three criteria: heat recovery, exergetic efficiency, and economic profitability. In this work, the barley straw as the biomass stock feed to produce biodiesel production processes are optimized by Heat Integration to construct heat exchanger network (HEN), and the promising modifications proposed from the results of the exergy analysis are then investigated to reduce the exergy loss of processes. For this case, modifications such as increasing the reaction temperature and adjusting the reactants ratio on the identified three exergetic losses units would reduce the process exergy loss by 23 % and increase the exergetic efficiency by 4.74 %.