Biodiesel Questions - Process Simulators - Component Database for Biofuels

[clinteastwood]

Long time user of Chemcad. The component database for biofuels is not too bad. I have had to add user components to model some of the subcomponents in the biodiesel reaction and although they dont perform perfectly, they work out ok (Using K values method - Modified Unifac).

Aspen One claims that it has a much larger component database, particularly for biofuel simulation. Does anyone have a comment about this?

Does Aspen have component database for the following:
Generic vegetable oil (eg triolein, palmitic triolein)
Generic Biodiesel (eg methyl oleate, methyl palmitate) *
Fatty acids (oleic acid, palmitic acid)
Soaps of these fatty acids, Sodium Oleate, Potassium Oleate *

(* these ones marked "*" exist in chemcad; but the others I have had to manually create with varying results.)

One one last thing, does Aspen thermodynamics work will for the biodiesel process? In Chemcad I have used Modified Unifac for the parts of the plant with two liquid phases, and NTRL for the water/methanol distillation.

Any comments that will help my decision process are welcome.

[juncruz]

Aspen plus has an extensive database for biodiesel. It includes fatty acids (all), monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, fatty acid methyl esters, glycerin, but only sodium oleate on the soap. No K-soaps either. Yes the thermodynamic works, NRTL is ok. You can do kinetic reactions on CSTR, plug flow, and reactive distillation as well. It also does sizing and rate based distillation on methanol water with whatever type of column

[juncruz]

you can even do L-L separation of FAME and glycerin + polars using unifac. quite accurate

[smartboy]

I've been trying to model a biodiesel plant in Chemcad as a project, but I've been having a lot of problems. And since I have the educational version, I can't even get support or request example files from Chemstations. Do you mind explaining how to set up the reactor and how to components not listed in Chemcad in?

[juncruz]

I can help you in aspen plus but not in chemcad