engleski

Biodiesel production in micro systems-macro impact?

Nowadays, people around the world become more and more aware about their impact on environment. Transportation and everyday life proved to be biggest problem, but also biggest opportunity. One of the “opportunists” is definitely biodiesel, as renewable and pure substitute for petroleum diesel. Although presented as pure fuel, composition of biodiesel presents some challenges when it comes to purity of the product. Biodiesel, a mixture of monoalkyl esters of long-chain fatty acids, provides better quality of exhaust gas emission and lower environment harmful effect. Over the years, transesterification proved to be most commonly used production process of biodiesel, even though the conventional process displayed some setbacks. Microreactor technology, as one possible improvement of conventional processes in terms of mixing, mass transfer and reducing the reaction time, has been thoroughly explored in recent decades. However, enzyme-catalyzed process path is still unexplored area.

biodiesel, enzymatic transesterification, microsystem, edible/waste oil

This work has been fully supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2016-06- 7993.