Date of Award

5-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Biosystems Engineering

Committee Member

Dr. Terry Walker, Committee Chair

Committee Member

Dr. Yi Zheng

Committee Member

Dr. Caye Drapcho

Abstract

Eversa Transform® was used with crude and glandless cottonseed oil to evaluate the key parameters in its performance. Eversa is one of the newer products produced by Novozymes A/S (Copenhagen, Denmark) and has attracted much industry use. Cottonseed oil is a fringe oil in the biodiesel production market that was not tested with Eversa Transform® to our knowledge. The goal of this research was to see which dominant parameters were the most influential on the performance of Eversa. After careful review of literature, temperature, enzyme amount and water amount were the most consistently manipulated variables to produce more optimal results. The analysis was conducted using gas chromatography method of ASTM D6584 to estimate the total conversion and the induction time to measure oxidative stability was conducted using EN15751. The conversion averaged to 98 % wt. across all samples. The enzyme dosage was observed to not be a factor in the enzyme’s ability to convert while water dosage and temperature were determined to be significant. ANOVA analyses show no indication of interaction between any variables. Induction periods of the glandless and heavy pigment (crude) cottonseed oils had distinct differences, but there was no indication that there was a difference between the two oils in conversion. A SuperPro Designer simulation up was simulated using 2% wt. Eversa to examine its potential for scale up and assumptions that washing steps were accurately estimated. Based on the output stream results of the kinetic model, the assumptions accurately represented what the data previously recorded.

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