Acceleration of biodiesel–glycerol decantation through NaCl-assisted gravitational settling: A strategy to economize biodiesel production

When making biodiesel, slow separation of glycerol; the main by-product of the transesterification reaction, could lead to longer operating times, bigger equipment and larger amount of steel and consequently increased production cost. Therefore, acceleration of glycerol/biodiesel decantation could play an important role in the overall biodiesel refinery process. In this work, NaCl-assisted gravitational settling was considered as an economizing strategy. The results obtained indicated that the addition of conventional NaCl salt decreased the glycerol settling time significantly up to more than five times. However, NaCl inclusion rates of more than 3 g to the mixture (i.e. 5 and 10 g) resulted in significantly less methyl ester purity due to the occurrence of miniemulsion phenomenon. Overall, addition of 1 g NaCl/100 ml glycerol–biodiesel mixture was found as optimal by accelerating the decantation process by 100% while maintaining the methyl ester purity as high as the control (0 g NaCl).