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About Us: The Penn State BioDiesel Research Group
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Background on Project The primary objective of the Biodiesel Project is to provide undergraduate students with a real-life, hands-on engineering project to enhance their chemical engineering principles. The students obtained and developed data from which they have conducted experiments, designed, constructed and operated a 25-gallon bio-diesel pilot plant used to transesterify vegetable oils into bio-diesel fuel. Waste cooking oils available on campus and from local restaurants are utilized as the feedstock. The primary objective will remain the enhancement of the education of students by providing challenging real life, hands-on environmental and sustainability engineering challenges to which they can apply their engineering principles. Three projects applicable to this objective have evolved from the first few years of this project:
Challenge Definition and Relationship to Biodiesel Project Educational Tool The project is student-run as a small, start-up company. The seniors act as the executive office of the "company" directing research, process development, equipment design and construction on the projects. All members enjoy real-world opportunity to design and optimize a production process, install equipment and piping, conduct HAZOP safety assessments, analyze samples, network with investors and the public, and market progress. Heavily focused on process engineering, these are all things you will need to do, and be expected to be able to do, once in an internship, co-op, or full-time position. Our group also provides a higher perspective in one's classwork as we learn something new each semester that will directly help the project. Group members are able to apply classroom studies in real-time, providing more meaning to course material and simultaneously increasing academic success. Challenge Each portion of the overall Biodiesel Project has unique goals and challenges. In the short term, we hope to recycle all local waste cooking oil and convert this feedstock into high-quality biodiesel fuel. Used cooking oils are disposed of at a cost to the user and primarily used as fuel supplements for commercial boilers, burners, or simply burned. When converted to biodiesel, waste cooking oil can be more efficiently used as a diesel fuel supplement in existing engines to reduce particulate emissions. Our challenge: Design and optimize a process to ensure each gallon of biodiesel exceeds legal specifications with the highest energy yield from existing feedstock volume. Sustainability Bio-diesel fuel is a leading alternative-fuel contender. According to numerous report by the NREL, biodiesel has an approximate energy return ratio of 3.2 to 1 (3.2 units of energy created for each unit of fossil fuel energy consumed in its life through production cycle) [1,2]. As this project will yield bio-diesel fuel from local waste cooking oils rather than soybean oil, we hope to exceed this energy production rate. In the United States, 40 billion gallons of diesel fuel are consumed annually for on-road transportation use. With the popular blend of 20 percent bio-diesel in all diesel fuel (B20), this translates to a an annual and increasing national biodiesel market of 8 billion gallons. Formed in Fall of 2003, our group hopes to put Penn State on the map. Innovation and Technical Merit The majority of current bio-diesel processes involve batch processes. The Bio-diesel Team has developed a preliminary design for a semi-continuous unit. A continuous process has economic merits that could reduce costs by an estimated 15-25%. A second economic factor is the disposal of the glycerol by-product. Currently, the untreated product is sold commercially for about 16 cents per pound. One idea is to convert the glycerol in-house back to alcohol so that it may be recycled in the process. Our group is also one of the few research groups who have explored the use of Cuphea (koo-FEE-uh) as a biodiesel feedstock. Originating in Central America and grown in many third-world countries, the cuphea plant was recently domesticated in the United States for research. While its potential benefits remain largely unexplored, admirable traits include the ability to grow in harsh, arid climates, produce twice the amount of oil per acre than soy, and contain high levels of short- to medium-chain fatty acids (capric, lauric, and others). We have found that due to its chemical structure, cuphea yields biodiesel that has a viscosity almost identical to that of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD), and significantly lower than biodiesel produced from traditional sources. Our hope is that this cuphea biodiesel may be blended to improve cold-weather starting as its viscosity, cloud point, and other characteristics should prevent it from bulking up as temperatures drop. Implementation Strategy Short term (1 year or less) it is planned to have a semi-continuous batch process unit built and operational to produce sufficient bio-diesel fuel from waste cooking oils on campus (1000 gallons per month) and local restaurants (500 gallons per month) to supply the requirements of the diesel vehicles and tractors in the Penn State farm operations. Currently, over 100 units are operating on commercially purchased B20. During planting and harvesting seasons up to 3000 gallons of fuel are used monthly. Long-term, the Bio-diesel Project objective is to develop a continuous unit that will supply the technology to build a commercial unit that will be able to supply Centre County and its technology used far beyond the local community. |
