First, a study of the kinetics for the esterification reaction
to produce biodiesel fuel by supercritical methanol technologies
has been presented. A first-order kinetic model has been
shown to fit experimental data. Furthermore, intensificationalternatives for the production of biodiesel fuel by the twostep
supercritical methanol method have been tested by using
the first-order kinetic model. Those configurations involve the
use of either reactive distillation or thermally coupled reactive
distillation to carry out the esterification reaction and the purification
of the product in the same shell. These alternatives
present lower energy consumptions when compared to the
conventional process. The energy consumptions are similar
to those predicted by the equilibrium calculations for the RD
and the reactive Petlyuk column (Gómez-Castro et al., 2010).
The purity of the biodiesel fuel in the reactive distillation systems
was targeted as 90% (mass) to avoid isomerization of the
methyl ester, which occurs when temperature is higher than
300 ◦C.