What correlation is appropriate to evaluate biodiesels and vegetable oils higher heating value (HHV)?

The heating value is one of the most important properties of animal fats, vegetable oils and biodiesels for their use as fuels in stead of petroleum. There are lots of formulae or correlations encountered in the literature to evaluate biomass fuels' higher heating value (HHV). Lots of them are not specially established for vegetable oils, animal fats and their derivatives. In this paper, some correlations previously published and based on ultimate analysis or fatty acid composition are applied to some bio oils samples collected from the literature. The aim of this article is to investigate what of them can be used to estimate animal fats, biodiesels, vegetable oils and their derivatives HHV with a high accuracy. With an absolute average error inferior to 4%, the results show that the formulae of : Channiwala and Parikh, Boie and Vondracek, Boie, Vondracek, Fassinou et al. Milne, IGT, Demirbas and Dulong can be used at this purpose with a high accuracy by comparison to the bomb calorimetric method. (Résumé d'auteur