Scalability of a Satellite Dish Solar Reflector for Use in the Synthesis of Biodiesel

Recently, solar reflectors developed from and demonstrated using repurposed satellite dishes have been incorporated as the sole thermal heat source for lab-scale synthetic chemical reactions. These solar reflectors use directed solar irradiation to conduct synthetic reactions, rather than the traditional route of collecting solar irradiation and then using an intermediate heat exchanger to transfer the thermal heat needed. The prior work has demonstrated that direct solar heat transfer can successfully be incorporated as the thermal heat source for various chemical reactions on the milliliter to liter scale. The present work answers the obvious question, can direct solar heating be scaled to practical capacities, i.e. 100s to 100s of thousands of liters. To answer this question, a mathematical model was developed to assess the scalability of the direct solar heating method. A case study was performed for the production of methylesters from soybean oil (biodiesel). A design-basis was developed to provide a common point of reference for comparing systems of different production capacities using a fixed reactor-reflector geometry to illustrate the effect of scale. The results suggest that batch processes are easily scaled to 10 L and continuous process to 10 L. Reactor and reflector sizes are predicted along with solar heated surface temperatures.