Hydrodynamic Cavitation Reactor for Efficient Biodiesel Production. A Review

Abstract

Biodiesel emerges as a viable option to replace fossil fuels, but the traditional process for the production of biodiesel requires a large energy expenditure, since transesterification has a slow conversion due to the immiscibility of alcohol and oil. On the other hand, with the hydrodynamic cavitation method, a shorter conversion time can be achieved with a high yield; however, there are few studies related to this method. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze information from different scientific publications to compare and visualize the parameters used to obtain biodiesel by means of a hydrodynamic cavitation reactor. For this reason, a bibliometric analysis and a systematic review based on the PRISMA method were carried out. In this sense, the relevant articles were selected from the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar databases published between January 2018 and July 2023.Finally, the values of biodiesel yield efficiency were obtained by analyzing the different operating parameters and the different feedstock sources for its elaboration in the hydrodynamic cavitation reactors and comparing their results with international standards. American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) D6751 y European Committee for Standardization(EN)14214. It is concluded that hydrodynamic cavitation produces biodiesel that meets international standards and that the highest yields in biodiesel production in most studies have temperature ranges between 50 to 65°C, alcohol: oil molar ratio of 6:1, and methanol is the most used in tranasesterification.