A novel perspective for techno-economic assessments and effects of parameters on techno-economic assessments for biodiesel production under economic and technical uncertainties

Abstract

Various parameters including biodiesel price, capital cost, interest rate and feedstock price, may exhibit variation in the techno-economic assessments of biodiesel production within project's lifetime due to economic and technical uncertainties.

A Non-Probabilistic Solution for Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis on Techno-Economic Assessments of Biodiesel Production with Interval Uncertainties

“…A value of 1.2104 × 10 −1 for η s implies that the project will not be profitable to a great extent, in other words, a considerable part of the outcomes may be economically infeasible under the uncertain interval parameters shown in Table 1. In our previous work [59], all the uncertain parameters are assumed as random variables following uniform distributions within their ranges, and we propose economical infeasibility probability (EIP) to measure economical feasibility for biodiesel production. For the same problem, the estimated value for EIP is 0.3676, implying that the project is partially economically feasible and the plant may be profitable with the probability of 0.6324, and in other words, 63.24 out of 100 outcomes will be economically feasible under the assumed probabilistic distribution [59].…”

“…The mathematical formulations of total profit, payback period, and net present value for this problem are defined as [42,58,59]:…”

“…Treating uncertainties as random variables may not be reasonable due to the fact that determining the precise PDFs requires a large number of data, but the data in practical engineering is usually limited due to lack of sufficient samples for TEA. This paper will propose a more rational solution for the TEA of palm biodiesel production based on the previous research works of the authors of [58,59]. In previous studies [58,59], the authors only collected very limited data on these uncertain parameters, and only the variation ranges or the lower bounds and upper bounds for uncertain parameters were determined.…”

“…This paper will propose a more rational solution for the TEA of palm biodiesel production based on the previous research works of the authors of [58,59]. In previous studies [58,59], the authors only collected very limited data on these uncertain parameters, and only the variation ranges or the lower bounds and upper bounds for uncertain parameters were determined. All of these uncertain parameters were assumed as random variables defined by uniform distributions, distributed uniformly within their variation ranges, and the TEA was done based on this assumption.…”

“…These research works have discovered that the uncertainties related to the random parameters have distinct effects on the TEA. The authors also studied the TEA for palm biodiesel production with uncertainties, which were assumed as random variables with uniform distributions, indicating that uncertain parameters are uniformly distributed within variation intervals [58,59].…”