ABSTRACT
162The environmentally friendly and renewable biodiesel fuel is steadily gaining attention and significance for use as an alternative or in blends with petro-diesel. For widespread commercialization of biodiesel, its production process should be cost-effective and optimized to produce high and qualified biodiesel yield. Blending biodiesel with petro-diesel would also overcome the high price of biodiesel and produce a fuel having the advantages of both bioand petrodiesel. So, it is important to optimize both production and blending processes and evaluate the bio-petro-diesel blends to reach to a fuel that agrees well with the international fuel standards and characterized by lower greenhouse gas emissions, better lubricity, cetane number, flash point, and flow properties.
This chapter deals with the applications of different statistical techniques to optimize the biodiesel production process and predict mathematical models describing the changes of some basic fuel properties with the volumetric percentage of biodiesel in the bio-petro-diesel blends to reach for the optimum ratio of high quality bio-petro-diesel blend.
