David Bolonio1,2, Philipp Marco Neu1, Sigurd Schober1, Martin Mittelbach1 and Laureano Canoira2
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Fundam Renewable Energy Appl
Biodiesel is currently produced from a catalytic transesterification reaction of various types of edible and non-edible oil with
methanol. The use of waste animal tallow instead of edible oils opens a route to recycle this waste. This material has the
advantage of lower costs but the problem of high content of free fatty acids, becoming necessary a pre-esterification reaction that
increases the cost of the catalytic process. The production of biodiesel using supercritical alcohols is appropriate for materials
with high acidity and water content, therefore the use of this process with animal fat is a promising alternative. Ethanol has been
used because it can be produced from biomass via fermentation resulting in a complete renewable biodiesel, instead of methanol
that derives from fossil feedstocks. Two different processes have been studied: first, the direct transesterification of animal fat
using supercritical ethanol and second a two-step process where the first step is a hydrolysis of the animal fat and the second step
is the esterification of the resulting fatty acids. The temperature, the molar ratio ethanol:fat and the time have been modified in
the different reactions to study the effect in the final conversion and the degradation of the unsaturated fatty acid esters, main
inconvenient of these high temperature and pressure processes.
David Bolonio is in his second year of the PhD. He studied Mining Engineer and the Master in Environmental Research, Modeling and Risk Assessment in the
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He has done a research stay at the Faculty of Chemistry in the University of Graz, has attended four conferences presenting his
research works and has three papers in high impact journals.
