Small-Scale Biodiesel Production Plants—An Overview

Maria Gabriela De Paola, Ivan Mazza, Rosy Paletta, Catia Giovanna Lopresto and Vincenza Calabrò
Additional contact information
Maria Gabriela De Paola: Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, Cubo 39 C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy
Ivan Mazza: Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, Cubo 39 C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy
Rosy Paletta: Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, Cubo 39 C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy
Catia Giovanna Lopresto: Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, Cubo 39 C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy
Vincenza Calabrò: Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and System Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, Cubo 39 C, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 7, 1-20

Abstract: Small-scale plants that produce biodiesel have many social, economic and environmental advantages. Indeed, small plants significantly contribute to renewable energy production and rural development. Communities can use/reuse local raw materials and manage independently processes to obtain biofuels by essential, simple, flexible and cheap tools for self-supply. The review and understanding of recent plants of small biodiesel production is essential to identify limitations and critical units for improvement of the current process. Biodiesel production consists of four main stages, that are pre-treatment of oils, reaction, separation of products and biodiesel purification. Among lots of possibilities, waste cooking oils were chosen as cheap and green sources to produce biodiesel by base-catalyzed transesterification in a batch reactor. In this paper an overview on small-scale production plants is presented with the aim to put in evidence process, materials, control systems, energy consumption and economic parameters useful for the project and design of such scale of plants. Final considerations related to the use of biodiesel such as renewable energy storage (RES) in small communities are discussed too.

Keywords: small-scale plants; biodiesel; waste cooking oils; in-situ analysis; nanogrid; renewable energy storage (RES) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/7/1901/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/7/1901/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:7:p:1901-:d:526574

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().