Universidade Federal do Ceará
PPGEQ – Programa de Pós-graduação em Engenharia Química

The scarcity of fossil fuels and the increase of environmental problems, such as greenhouse effect and the global climate change, reinforce the attention to alternative energy sources. In this context, biodiesel shows an excellent alternative for the replacement of petroleum diesel due to some interesting properties, such as non-toxicity, biodegradability, better lubrificant, complete miscibility in petroleum diesel and good usage in a diesel engine with no significant modifications in the engine. Brazil is among the top three world producers of biodiesel, mainly due to the wide variety of climatic conditions, soil conditions and biodiversity, making the environment conducive to the production of oil that are used for the production of biodiesel. Today, the diesel fuel sold in the country has 7% (v / v) of biodiesel in its composition. In this context, the accurate determination of physical and chemical properties such as density (ρ) and dynamic viscosity (��) is important to the design of diesel engines and to the design and operation of biodiesel plants. In the same way, the speed of sound (u) is one important acoustic property that affects directly the fuel injection characteristics and the amount of NOx emissions. Furthermore, this property also permits the estimation of other thermodynamics properties such as isentropic/isothermal compressibilities (kS, kT), isobaric/isocoric heat capacity (cp, cv), Joule- Thompson coefficient (ȠJT), isobaric thermal expansion coefficient (αp) and bulk modulus (β).This work presents experimental data of density, viscosity and speed of sound of binary systems containing oil, biodiesel and petroleum diesel. Speed of sound and density data were adjusted according to an equation showing a curvilinear behavior with mole fraction and a linear behavior with temperature and viscosity data were adjusted to an equation with temperature (T) and mass fraction (w) as independent variables with an exponential dependence of the inverse of temperature and proportional dependence with mass fraction. In addition, some predictive methods for estimating the three properties listed above were analyzed. Furthermore, the isentropic compressibility (kS), the bulk modulus (β) and the isobaric expansivity were derived from the experimental data for density and speed of sound.