In
the present study,
the
transesterification of soybean oil with ethanol under supercritical
conditions was investigated using a packed-bed tubular reactor. The
experiments were performed with an oil/alcohol molar ratio of 1:40,
a pressure of 15 MPa, and different conditions of temperature (573–673
K), flow rate (0.5–1.0 mL/min), and bed porosity (0.32–1.0).
A phenomenological model was developed to describe and analyze the
results. The highest ester yield (98.99%) was obtained for the lower
bed porosity (0.32), under 673 K and 0.5 mL/min with a residence time
of 5.44 min. The kinetic and dispersion coefficients were estimated
using the particle swarm optimization algorithm, and the model fitted
the experimental data with an R
2 coefficient
of 0.97. The proposed kinetic model followed the behavior of the Arrhenius
equations. Low values of dispersion were
observed under conditions of lower flow rate and porosity. An analysis
of the model allowed us to verify that the increase of the ester yield
produced occurs at small values of the Reynolds number and high Peclet
numbers.
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