Biolubricant Production: from the Acknowledgment of Experimental Plant Using Molecular Distillation as Downstream Process, the Development of a Unit Operation Into Aspen Plus®

Abstract

Biolubricant is a lubricant that can decompose naturally, helping to reduce the number of harmful chemicals such as petrochemical oils released into the environment. This is a promissory product with features similar to mineral oils. Currently, the replacement of energy sources from petroleum by biofuels is being hardly studied, but for other applications such as lubricants, there are still many opportunities to be developed. Conventional downstream separators to achieve high levels of yield and purity of biolubricants have to operate upon high-temperature conditions. The higher the temperature the higher the degradation ratio of molecules. Molecular distillation (MD) is an effective alternative and operates with lower pressure and, consequently, lower temperature. However, this tool is not able to be used in the Aspen Plus® to predict large-scale demands as well as to carry out simulations for optimization. Hence, this paper aims to propose the development of a general procedure to emulate a falling film molecular distillation in the commercial simulator Aspen Plus®. The contribution of this paper was to define and model a suitable unit operation in the commercial simulator. This work was supported by the experimental unit already designed and implemented in the lab (LDPS). The simulation data computing efficiency elements were according to experimental results, indicating it as a high potential tool to emulate MD. This study supports the idea of a cost-effective biolubricant design since these results are relevant to predict large-scale demands as well as to carry out simulations integrated with other unit operations.