engleski

Impact of millireactor dimensions on conversion of sunflower oil to FAME

Company research departments and institutes for chemical engineering have just begun to adopt technologies of additive manufacturing (AM), such as 3D‐printing, which they use mostly to make prototypes and produce individual components. One of the examples how AM can be used in chemical industry is producing special types of reactors for continuous production called microreactors.The basic structural unit of the microreactor system is a microchannel which can have a rectangular or circular cross‐section, with an area of several μm2 to several mm2. Depending on the diameter of the channel, it is possible to divide reactors into: nano‐ (1 nm to 100 nm), micro‐ (100 nm to 1 mm) and milli‐ (1 mm to 10 mm) reactors. In this paper, an approach for producing simple circular cross‐section millireactors through stereolithography (SLA) AM technology is presented. In order to investigate the impact of channel dimensions on conversion of sunflower oil to fatty acid methyl esters (FAME), millireactors with different channel diameters were produced (from 1.5 mm to 3.5 mm). To demonstrate the functionality of the whole system, transesterification reaction of sunflower oil using methanol with addition of KOH base catalyst to FAME was monitored by FTIR, NMR and GC

millireactors, imact of chanell dimensions, FAME, additive manufacturing

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