METHANOL RECOVERY

Methanol Recovery is one of the most important parts of the production process, second only to the reaction stage. Only slightly more than half of the methanol used for the reaction process is actually consumed, leaving high amounts in both the Biodiesel and glycerine phases. With today’s methanol prices this means any Biodiesel producer simply cannot afford to throw away almost half of the methanol they purchase. With this in mind, Incbio offers two types of methanol recovery systems:

• for our units with base transesterification only, we offer a vacuum evaporation module which recovers methanol at >99.5% purity. This unit is more than a simple vacuum evaporator and has been designed specifically for methanol recovery, guaranteeing high recovery rates and purity;

• for our units with acid esterification water is created in the process and also used in the washing step, as such a vacuum evaporator would not attain the required recovery and purity. In these cases a fractional distillation column is used to ensure that we achieve the goals of 99.9% methanol recovery at over 99.5% purity, ready to be reintroduced in the production process.