Exergy-Based Sustainability Analysis of Biodiesel Production and Combustion Processes

Abstract

Sustainability has become a relevant issue for the biodiesel industry. As a consequence, increasingly advanced engineering methods and metrics are being applied to make decisions on biodiesel production and combustion systems in order to achieve the most thermodynamically, economically and environmentally sound synthesis pathways and conditions. Among the various approaches developed, exergy-based methods exhibit significant promise for the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of energy conversion and biofuel production processes. Exergy-based analyses provide valuable insights into the performance, costs and environmental impacts of biodiesel production and combustion systems. In this chapter, after briefly describing the exergy concept and its theoretical background, an overview is provided of the most important researches relating to the application of this approach and its extensions for analyzing biodiesel production and combustion systems. In general, quantifying exergy destruction rate and exergy efficiency is the greatest focus of researchers globally when applying exergy method in this domain. However, applications of extended exergy-based methods like exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental analyses, as comprehensive decision-making paradigms for evaluating, optimizing, and retrofitting biodiesel production and combustion processes, are limited. Future research is needed into finding the most efficient, cost-effective, and environmental-friendly routes for biodiesel synthesis and its subsequent utilization, using exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental approaches together with advanced knowledge- and evolutionary-based optimization techniques.