Vapor-liquid equilibria for methanol + fatty acid methyl ester binary systems near critical temperature of methanol

The VLE for methanol + fatty acid methyl ester binary systems were measured at 493 - 543 K. The phase behavior was studied by changing the kind of fatty acid methyl esters. The mole fractions of methanol in vapor phase were close to unity for the systems. The mole fractions of methanol in vapor phase were very close to unity. Therefore, in biodiesel production processes, the phase separation after the transesterification reaction could be performed by only pressure control to recycle methanol used in the reaction. The mole fractions of methanol in liquid phase for both binary systems were almost the same at each temperature. Peng- Robinson Stryjek- Vera EOS with the modified conventional mixing rule was adopted to correlate the present experimental data for methanol + fatty acid methyl ester systems. The correlated results and the experimental data were in good agreement. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA 11/12-17/2006).