Find out how Imperium Renewables Ensures Biodiesel Quality     

As a pioneer of renewable energy sources, Imperium Renewables produces over two million gallons of biodiesel per week, which it sells to fuel trading companies in the US & Europe. Numerous quality tests are performed to ensure its biodiesel meets the strict governing standards.

The challenge of Ensuring Biodiesel Quality
Biodiesel is an environmentally friendly, clean burning, renewable energy source made from vegetable oils, waste oils or fats derived from farm crops. In order for biodiesel to be sold as a fuel or blending stock, it must meet a set of requirements defined by ASTM D6751 or EN14214 standards. Imperium operates within the compliance guidelines of stringent ASTM standards. However, their next generation propriety technology produces consistently high-quality fuel that exceeds the most exacting specifications set by any commercial standard, including ASTM, D6751, EN 14214, EN 14538 and BQ-9000 fuel quality standards.

Selection of an Ideal Biodiesel Analysis Solution
At full production, Imperium Renewables produces two million gallons of biodiesel each week and with such a high production rate the company requires fast and extremely reliable analytical instrumentation for its routine analysis. In order to ensure that the biodiesel meets regulations for elemental contaminants, the instrument must be capable of detecting a range of elements, often at low concentration levels, achieving specific detection limits for elements such as phosphorus, sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. In addition, the instrument needs to be user friendly and rugged to enable repeatable analysis of all sample types to improve the analytical process and to ensure compliance with the strict standards set by the ASTM.

Why ICP
For Imperium Renewables, an instrument that guaranteed the efficient analysis of a large volume of samples is essential. An ICP solution was considered to be sufficiently fast and powerful enough to enable the screening of a wide range of elements. In addition, the company required an instrument that did not compromise the space-efficiently of their laboratory. The Thermo Scientific iCAP 6300 Radial ICP (Part of the Thermo Scientific iCAP 6000 Series) was selected as the perfect analytical solution for their challenging biodiesel analysis.

The Thermo Scientific iCAP 6300 Radial ICP
The iCAP 6300 Radial ICP is perfectly designed for high throughput liquids analysis. The instrument provides powerful performance combined with cost efficiency which made it the ideal solution for Imperium Renewables requirements. In addition the company is benefiting from its fast, reliable and simplified performance for their routine analysis of biodiesel. Nathan Shenk-Boright, Technical Manager at Imperium commented “The iCAP 6300 ICP is an exceptional tool that helps us to monitor the metal content within samples allowing us to produce biodiesel with metal contents well below the required limit. It also enables us to monitor metals that cause corrosion and plug filters.”

Summary
“The iCAP 6300 ICP provides accurate routine analysis 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year with a minimum amount of downtime” explains Shenk-Boright. “It’s easy to use and for our in-house laboratory, it is an exceptional tool that provides outstanding results with little day to day maintenance required”.