Research On The Production Of Biodiesel With Artemisia Argyi

Artemisia argyi is a widely grown non-grain wild crop in northern areas in China,and its seed is rich in oil, so in this paper we press the seeds of Artemisia argyi into oil, and choose the appropriate process to produce biodiesel, this method both make reasonable and effective use of wild plant resources, but also provided a new choice for solving the energy crisis.Using GC-MS we can detecte the composition and content of Artemisia argyi oil, from which we can better understand the subject qualitatively and quantitatively, then acid value, iodine value, saponification value, peroxide value and other physical and chemical properties were studied and tested, the main physical and chemical indicators provide reference for further production of biodoesel.After comparing several approach of producing biodiesel and economic costs and feasibility of industrialization, we choosed to use the route of chemical process to produce biodiesel. Thinking of the physical and chemical properties of Artemisia argyi oil, two steps is needed to produce biodiesel: pre-esterification process and the transesterification reaction. For the pre-esterification process, we used response surface designing to optimize the process parameters, proposed a mathematical model of the regression equations which is statistically analyzed, and discussed the significant factors, at last the best process parameters was concluded: when temperature is 67.78℃, the quantity of concentrated sulfuric acid is 1.19%, and reaction time is 1.01 hours, we have the minimum acid value: 0.42 KOH mg / g . For the transesterification reaction, we used orthogonal test to optimize the process. Using the acid value of Artemisia argyi oil as the objective function, we investigated the factors of temperature, catalyst amount, reaction time, and the final optimum conditions is as follows: the reaction temperature is 70℃, KOH adding 0.5%, the reaction time is 0.5 hours, and in this condition the percentages of biodiesel is the highest.The vapor-liquid equilibrium of the biodiesel component is barely reported, to enrich the basic data of the biodiesel,we selected Methyl palmitate and Methyl stearate as the subjects, which is the common components of biodiesel. We did experiment of vapor-liquid equilibrium in decompression conditions (10KPa) using the method of binary cycling. Then we used the language of Matlab to simulate the data with the model of UNIFAC,Wilson,NRTL. According to the result, the NRTL model and the UNIFAC model can both successfully simulate the data.