Portable Biodiesel Production System

Develop a mixing and controlling module for a portable biodiesel production system. Build a working portable biodiesel production system.

Background
Biodiesel, a renewable transportation fuel and substitute for petroleum diesel, has been attracting increasing interest from both the environmental groups and the transportation industry because it can significantly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and wean our dependency on fossil fuels. However, the major roadblock for biodiesel to become a mainstream diesel fule lies in its high costs and low efficiency in production resulting from a chemical reaction called transesterification, which requires raising temperature to above 60°C and takes hours to convert the vegetable oil to biodiesel using base catalyst.

What is biodiesel?
Biodiesel is the product of an oil, alcohol and catalyst reaction. It is commonly referred to as methyl esters or FAME (fatty acid methyl esters). This product is useful because it is a relatively low cost and environmentally friendly fuel that produces efficient energy in machines.

How does biodiesel work?
Biodiesel burns similar to that of any other fuel where it needs to be in presence of oxygen. In the pure liquid form, biodiesel would be too tightly packed to combust. In an engine, the use of fuel injectors and extreme amounts of compression ignite the mixture in a chamber to produce useful mechanical energy.

How is biodiesel produced?
Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil, animal fats or left over frying oil along with an alcohol and catalyst in a process called transesterification (figure 1). In order for the biodiesel molecules to form, their needs to be some sort of alcohol, usually ethanol, and a catalyst (potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide) which gets mixed together before going through a reaction process that produces methyl esters and crude glycerol. These methyl esters are what we call biodiesel.