The aim of this work is to study the influence of the physicochemical characteristics of neem seeds, according to their mass and oil content, on the production of biodiesel. After the physical characterization of the seeds and extraction of the oil (triglycerides), biodiesel was produced from crude neem seed oil by transesterification with ethanol in the presence of sodium hydroxide. This study shows that the physicochemical characteristics of these seeds vary according to the origin of the samples. The seeds from Zidim, with a mass average of 200 seeds evaluated at 141.36 g and an almond content of 40.70%, have better characteristics compared to those collected in the city of Maroua, with average values evaluated at 128.00 g and 36.05%, respectively. Almonds have an average lipid content of 53.98 and 56.75% for the Maroua and Zidim samples, respectively. This study also reveals that neem oil, by its physicochemical characteristics, has a satisfactory quality for a valorization in the production of biodiesel. However, its relatively high free fatty acid content is a major drawback, which leads to a low yield of biodiesel, evaluated on average at 89.02%, and requires a desacidification operation to improve this yield. The analysis of biodiesel indicates physicochemical characteristics close and comparable to those of petrodiesel, particularly in terms of calorific value, density, kinematic viscosity, acid value, evaluated at 41.00 MJ/kg, 0.803, 4.42 cSt, and 0.130 mg/g, respectively.
This paper focused on a techno-economic study of a standalone PV/battery system for electrical energy supply. For a particular case study in Cameroon, the system is optimally designed thanks to a double-objective firefly optimization algorithm, based on a defined operational strategy. The two objective functions simulated simultaneously using FA are: the cost of energy (COE) function and the function defining the loss of power supply probability (LPSP). Different optimal configurations of the system have been obtained on the Pareto front with respect to their LPSP. For a total load demand of 20196.7 kWh, the lowest cost configuration with LPSP of 0% is composed by a number of 63 modules and a battery capacity of 370.295 kWh. The related COE is 0.2587 $/kWh, corresponding to a total net present cost of 87422 $. However with this configuration, the energy of batteries could not be able solely to respond to the energy demand for 3 continuous days. In that case, the increase of the PV power production (by increasing the number of PV modules) could allow to the batteries to fulfil this deficiency. But this solution increases the investment cost to up to 11.17%, considering a system with 80 PV modules. Another solution consists in reducing the size of the battery bank to avoid its unnecessary oversizing. In this case, the COE and the system investment cost reduce to up to 28.77% for 1 day batteries’ autonomy considered. The obtained results have demonstrated that the cost of a PV/battery system is mostly influenced by the batteries’ size, while the system reliability is mostly related to the PV size.
The aim of this study is the determination of a suitable solar radiation model for the twelve cities of Chad based on meteorological data. Three appropriate models are used to estimate the solar radiation of each site. The choice of these models is based on statistical tests such as the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), the Mean Bias Error (MBE), the Mean Percentage Error (MPE), and the Nash-Sutcliffe Equation ( KeywordsGlobal Solar Radiation, Sabbagh, Allen, Angstrom-Prescott, Meteorological Data How to cite this paper: Soulouknga, M.H.,
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