Enhanced Electrocatalytic Biodiesel Production with Chitosan Gel (Hydrogel and Xerogel)

Bioinspired microstructures of chitosan hydrogel provide enhanced wear protection.

We describe the fabrication of physical chitosan hydrogels exhibiting a layered structure. This bilayered structure, as shown by SEM and confocal microscopy, is composed of a thin dense superficial zone (SZ), covering a deeper zone (DZ) containing microchannels orientated perpendicularly to the SZ. We show that such structure favors diffusion of macromolecules within the hydrogel matrix up to a...

Chitosan/nanosilver Nanofiber Composites with Enhanced Morphology and Microbiological Properties

In recent years natural polymers have been widely used in biomedical applications. Application of natural and biocompatible polymers in wound dressing, medical sutures and tissue engineering are extensively growing. Additional properties are provided when metal nanoparticles such as silver and gold are incorporated in to the fibers. However, nowadays nanofibers due to their inherent properties ...

Biodiesel Production with Solid Catalysts

Biodiesel is usually produced by transesterification of vegetable oils or animal fats with chemical catalysts, especially in the presence of strong acidic or basic solutions, such as hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, sodium hydroxide, sodium methoxide and potassium hydroxide. Homogeneous alkali catalysts can convert triglycerides to their corresponding fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) with hig...

Dynamic simulation of sorption enhanced reaction processes for biodiesel production

The objective of this work was to establish fixed bed sorption enhanced reactors (SER) and simulated moving bed reactors (SMBR) for the production of high purity biodiesel (fatty acid methyl ester, FAME) using esterification reactions between fatty acids (FA) in used oils and methanol. This study has demonstrated that these processes have tremendous potential in terms of overcoming the low conv...

Biodiesel Production and Quality