ABSTRACT

Industrial research departments and chemical engineering institutes have begun to adopt additive manufacturing technologies, such as stereolithography for producing special types of reactors for continuous production. Microreactors have been widely used to improve the mass and heat transfer processes between immiscible liquid-liquid phases, but with the disadvantage of requiring sophisticated technology for their manufacture. In this paper, an approach for producing millireactors by stereolithography and rapid optimization of millireactor design with circular cross-section is presented.

Transesterification of vegetable oils with alcohols is widely used method for biodiesel synthesis, generally taking place in a batch reactor. Microreactors due to their short residence times and high biodiesel yields are currently being explored for continuous production, but have disadvantages in low production volumes and high pressure drops. To overcome above-mentioned problems, millireactors with channel diameters from 1.5 mm to 3.5 mm were produced in order to investigate the impact of channel dimensions on conversion of sunflower oil to fatty acid methyl esters (FAME). Transesterification reaction of sunflower oil using methanol with addition of KOH base catalyst to FAME was monitored by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography, and nuclear magnetic resonance.

Results show that millireactors with smaller channel dimensions and processes with higher temperatures at certain residence times can be used to achieve better biodiesel yield in much shorter time than batch reactors. In addition, continuous way of FAME production in millireactors is presented. Production in millireactors provided an improvement when compared to microreactors because they have low pressure drops and higher production volumes.

摘要

工业研究部门和化学工程学院已开始采用增材制造技术，例如立体光刻技术，以生产可连续生产的特殊类型的反应器。微反应器已被广泛用于改善不溶混的液-液相之间的质量和传热过程，但其缺点是需要复杂的技术来制造它们。本文提出了一种通过立体光刻技术和快速优化具有圆形横截面的千变电阻设计来制造千变电阻的方法。

植物油与醇的酯交换反应是生物柴油合成中广泛使用的方法，通常在间歇反应器中进行。微型反应器由于其短的停留时间和高的生物柴油收率而正在被探索用于连续生产，但是在低产量和高压降方面具有缺点。为了克服上述问题，生产了通道直径为1.5mm至3.5mm的毫作用器，以研究通道尺寸对葵花籽油转化为脂肪酸甲酯（FAME）的影响。通过傅里叶变换红外光谱法，气相色谱法和核磁共振法监测使用甲醇和向KAME中添加KOH碱催化剂的葵花籽油的酯交换反应。

结果表明，与间歇式反应器相比，具有较小通道尺寸的毫列反应器和在特定停留时间具有较高温度的过程可用于在短得多的时间内获得更好的生物柴油收率。另外，提出了在毫微作用器中连续进行FAME生产的方法。与微型反应器相比，毫反应器的产量有所提高，因为它们的压降低且产量更高。