LAUSR

The world depends on petroleum for everything from the plastics that contain our food to the natural gas that heats our homes to the gasoline that feed our cars’ engines. With rising prices of petroleum reflecting demand for this finite resource, attention has been turned to alternative sources of energy. Biodiesel, which exhibits many of the same properties as conventional diesel but is derived from biological sources, is an attractive alternative. Fats and oils are converted to biodiesel, fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs), by transesterification. FAMEs are subsequently thermally cracked to form more lightweight transportation fuels such as natural gas, kerosene, and possibly gasoline. We aim to further understand the thermal cracking procedure, at an atomic level, in hopes that this may aid in future engineering of viable fuels. We will present our study on the effective computational modeling of bond dissociations in the FAMEs methyl linoleate and methyl oleate, which are the most common biodiesel produ...