| dc.description.abstract | Biodiesel promising as an alternative to the diesel. The transesterification reaction process involved the reaction of triglyceride with alcohol in the presence of catalyst. In the research, the sunflower oil and ethanol were used with the addition of 0.75wt% of NaOH that act as catalyst. The Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method was used to simulate the transesterification reaction process by using COMSOL Multiphysics software. There are three different of geometry configuration designed namely T, TCO and TSO microreactor. The reaction engineering, transport of diluted species and laminar flow were selected as the physics interface of the simulation. The inlet pressure range 0.0001 Pa to 0.01 Pa, temperature of 25°C, 50°C, 75°C and the molar ratio at 6:1, 9:1were used to investigate their effect of toward the biodiesel conversion. From the result obtained, the TCO microreactor shows the highest biodiesel conversion compared to the T and TSO microreactor. This is because the circular shape with round edges provides flow more easily than ones with sharper edges, which is the square shape. By this, the circular shape can enhance the mixing flow as well as increase the biodiesel conversion. Besides, when the temperature increases, the biodiesel
conversion increase except for the temperature of 75°C. This is because temperature of 75°C was beyond the normal boiling point of ethanol and lead to the decrement of biodiesel conversion. Next, if the ethanol to oil molar ratio was increase, the biodiesel conversion was also increase. In the research, it can be concluded that, the highest conversion of biodiesel can be obtained by using the TCO microreactor at the optimum temperature of 50°C, the ethanol to oil molar ratio at 9:1 and the pressure was 0.0001 Pa. | en_US |
