Influence of Fatty Acid Profiles during Supercritical Transesterification of Conventional and Non-Conventional Feedstocks: A Review

In this study, the influence of fatty acids of both conventional and non-conventional oils in supercritical transesterification method has been reviewed. Literature on oils such as moringa oleifera, manketti, croton megalocarpus, palm and soybean has been reviewed to establish an understanding of the supercritical transesterification that employed methanol as alcohol. This study reveals that lower yield of methyl esters is observed when higher temperatures are employed in oils that are highly dominated with polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as manketti and croton megalocarpus. And the reason is that poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are present in the oils decompose easily at higher temperatures and thus reduce the methyl esters yield.

Reservoir Characterization of the Early Jurassic Butmah Formation Using Well Log Data in Selected Wells from Iraqi Kurdistan Region

The reservoir characterization of Butmah Formation (Early Jurassic) was studied in two wells: (AT-1) and (SH-1B) from Atrush and Shaikhan Oilfields respectively, in Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Well logs including;sonic, density, neutron, gamma ray, and resistivity, were employed to investigate the formation. The petrophysical properties, such as lithology, shale volume, porosity, water saturation, hydrocarbon saturation, and bulk water volume, were estimated using Interactive Petrophysics Software (IP). Water saturation, bulk volume of water, residual hydrocarbon, and movable hydrocarbon were plotted as Computer Processed Interpretation (CPI) for Butmah Formation in the studied wells. In order to check reliability of log data, lithology of the formation was detected using neutron-density cross plot and M-N cross plot. The results of log interpretation display that Butmah Formation is composed of dolomite, limestone with anhydrite and shale in the studied wells. The calculated shale volume shows low clay content. Therefore, Butmah Formation is considered as a clean formation in both wells. Porosity was estimated using porosity logs (sonic, density, and neutron) and had the average total porosity of (7% - 8%) in the two wells. Based on the determined petrophysical properties, particularly porosity and hydrocarbon saturation, it can be concluded that Butmah Formation seems potentially good in reserving oil.

Heat Transfer Optimization in Air Flat Plate Solar Collectors Integrated with Baffles

This paper presents an experimental analysis for comparisons of conventional flat plate solar collectors and collectors integrated with different numbers of baffles. Heat transfer between absorber plate and drying fluid (air) has been one of the major challenges in the design and operations of the indirect solar dryer systems. In this experiment, efficiency of air flat plate solar collector integrated with 2, 3, 4 and 8 baffles was studied and compared with the ordinary collector. The results showed that integrating solar collector with baffles significantly increased the efficiency of the system. It was noted that collector with 2, 3, 4 and 8 baffles had a mean efficiency of 29.2%, 31.3%, 33.1% and 33.7% respectively while with no baffles was 28.9%. The analysis showed that when there were less than four baffles in the collector, heat transfer was dominant over pressure drop and hence high efficiency. However, when the number of baffles exceeded four, the effect associated with an increase in pressure drop highly observed compared to heat transfer coefficient, thus resulted to insignificant increase in efficiency. Therefore, the optimum number of four baffles was commended for the designed model for optimum efficiency.