%0 Journal Article
%T Design and performance assessment of an in-house fabricated microreactor for enzyme-catalysed biodiesel synthesis
%A Ali Hussain Alhindy
%A Ali Mohammed Alsaei
%A Edrees Ebrahem
%A Elamin M. Elkanzi
%A Hayat Abdulla Yusuf
%A S. M. Zakir Hossain
%J Arab Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences
%D 2020
%R https://doi.org/10.1080/25765299.2020.1766789
%X Abstract The production of biodiesel from transesterification of oils is the currently available alternative to consumable fuels. The study focuses on the performance assessment of a microreactor platform for biodiesel production. Since a microreactor provides better mass transfer and a higher surface-to-volume ratio, this significantly contributes to augmenting the reaction rate of biodiesel production at reduced cost. In this study, firstly the T-shaped microfluidic reactor was fabricated on a PMMA (poly methyl methacrylate) sheet. Then, the kinetics of enzymatic transesterification reaction for biodiesel synthesis in this reactor was investigated. A combination of sunflower oil and methanol was used as feedstock in the presence of lipase from Thermomyces lanuginous as a catalyst and tert-butanol as a solvent. The reaction was carried out under ambient conditions (1£¿atm and 30£¿¡ãC) where 285 v% of tert-butanol was loaded to oil with 4£¿wt% lipase, and the molar ratio of oil to methanol was 1:2.5. Gas Chromatography was used to measure the concentration of biodiesel. The kinetic parameters such as maximum reaction rate (Vmax) and Michaelis ¨CMenten constant (KM) were found to be 0.725 (mol/L.min) and 0.092£¿mol/L, respectively. High Vmax and low KM values indicated the better performance of the reactor. In addition, a Lineweaver¨CBurk plot with excellent coefficient of determination (R2) of 99.5% supported the high performance of the microreactor
%U https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25765299.2020.1766789