still dont get the purpose of the engine. If it is not meant to show that you have really made diesel, what is it for? Why run a lab engine inside, make some pollution, just to see it spin? Now if we had something we wanted to hook that engine up to, thats different.
If it is a question of disposing of demo fuel, I am sure that someone in the makers has a diesel car. Could just pour product into tank. I will send shout see who answers.
SoâŚ
you SAY you donât get the purpose of the engine, but then expound on the reason for which itâs desirable, so it seems like you DO get it.
Saying you made biodiesel is one thing to an observer.
Them observing said biodiesel perform the function of diesel is another. And doing so in a relatable way, another still.
At a bare minimum, running an engine that does nothing is a demonstration thereof. Making that engine power something would be a logical expansion.
Making that something a vehicle is (for most observers) the ultimate demonstration.
So, yeah. Make biodiesel. Nifty.
Use it to make an engine spin. Cool.
Make the engine power something (generator, so you can measure the power output, for example, or a propeller, so you can feel the air it can move): COOL!
Make it power something they can drive (e.g. a go-kart to putt around the back lot in): BITCHINâ!
Itâs just a way to bring the theoretical production of biodiesel from VO into the ultimate reality. EXACTLY how thatâs accomplished is pretty darned open-ended, with one path being an internal combustion engine. The upside of that is: virtually every observer in the developed world can relate.
Unfortunately, most observers will be underwhelmed if you point to a bottle of biodiesel and SAY you made that, and it can do stuff. Showing them will work much better.
I think @TLAR has experience with biod, but I donât know if he has any vehicles currently available for âdisposingâ thereof. I would volunteer the 'SpaceShuttle, but thatâs not within the scope of my authority. Iâd be interested to see if you get any takers if you put the word out⌠If you can get someone to do what this person does in this video, itâll have impact.
(less than a biodiesel powered run in a go-kart, butâŚ)
You do realize that the same engine would also run on plain vegetable oil. So we could start with plain vegetable oil, do absolutely nothing to it, then claim we converted it to biodiesel, with the âproofâ being that the go-kart will run on it.
to show by a practical demonstration that what you have is no longer veg oil, running a cart is not it. The main advantage /difference of biodiesel over plain veg oil is that it has less tendency to gel at low temp and stores better.
There really is not an interesting ârelatableâ demonstration of these properties.
Yet easy to show chemically that you have indeed transformed the veg oil into something else. If you say that the class members have no interest in chemistry, well thay are in the wrong class, they are looking for a class on the practical aspects of making fuel on a consumer scale. Dont get me wrong, that would be a great class, but much more challenging to put together and would definitely need a consumer for the fuel. And even those people would be better off truly understanding the chemistry. I thought demo (1 L) scale would be a good start.
Sorry. I misunderstood. I got the impression that we were looking to make people interested in the science of biodiesel production via practical demonstration.
Yes, I realize you can run SVO.
Thereâs a chemistry class (or 2) to have behind doing that well, too, as well as the possibilities for various physics classes.
But if you want to hook the interests of looky-loos on the science (i.e. draw a larger audience), itâs beneficial to demonstrate relatable practicality.
If you do not want to make people interested in whatâs going on, keep the scope of relatability and appeal narrow. Either way, suits me fine. Josh appeared interested in a practical demonstration of using the end product.
You are correct.
Godspeed.
Saw the video. Note that this took four days, mostly time to settle out glycerol from gallons of fluid.
The product she made is ghastly, caustic and sure to destroy her car in time. T No question she made some biodiesel, or there would be no glycerol, but here was no washing step, no heating, really feeble mixing, this would have had very low yield. She could just as easily said some magic words, put the waste veg oil into her tank exactly as it was, without any methoxide, and her car would have started just as well.
The liter-scale demo can be done within a class period and makes a really pretty product, because it is so much easier to thoroughly and evenly heat, mix, wash, and settle a small volume. I will look for a good video, but in meantime what you get is a golden liquid that you might actually be willing to put in your tank, floating above a clear gooey well-defined layer that is glycerine and looks like it, rather than like toxic sludge.
I played with biodiesel for a while over ten years ago. Now itâs hard to scavenge WVO from restaurants. They have people who pay to pick it up or take it for free as a service. If you raid their barrels, they get kind of upset about that. I had a couple sources but they now have contracts with companies to pick up.
OTOH, you might find some small restaurant with WVO or you can frequently find WVO cheap on craigslist either as people reselling it or people who started to do biodiesel and got tired of it and have it sitting around.
If you use WVO directly, it must be highly filtered or (better) centrifuged to first clean it.
Itâs not entirely true that you can sub WVO for biodiesel. WVO is triacylglyceride and biodiesel is typically the methyl ester of the fatty acid from the TAG. Depends on the car, the engine, the temperature whether you dilute it or not with regular diesel. Hot weather with a warm engine might run warm WVO just fine but you must flush the system with some version of âdieselâ before shutting down in many cases to prevent a gooped up system when things cool down. This means you need a fuel heater system and a fuel mutiplexer.
Since many folks wonât be running on pure BD, a good compromise is to skip the biodiesel steps and just add the filtered WVO to the diesel tank. Different vehicles have different tolerance to this.
One of my farm neighbors told me that his truck fleet routinely filtered their waste crankcase oil and just added it to their diesel for 40 years without incident. Indeed, Iâve seen systems for centrifugation of waste engine oil to reuse in the tank with diesel or to use as a heating oil.
Iâd love to learn about the continuous flow process or in any case keep up with this project!
If you can find it, a Lister diesel (generator) is a great engine to use to test your product. It will run on just about anything.
There are many folks that run old ATF in their diesels as well.
I have two other diesels than my commuter carâŚthe older vane type injection pump diesels are often better suited for waste veggie oil.
My non injection pump diesel ( commuter car) does fine on B10,B20 and todayâs low sulphur diesel but I wouldnât put home brew in it without close scrutiny.
Arenât all of our fuels bio? Petroleum products are most definitely derived from biological sources.
And what about wood gas as a fuel source?
https://makezine.com/2010/06/24/lost-knowledge-wood-gas-vehicles/
Wonderful to hear from someone with actual biodiesel experience!
I did not mean to suggest that running wvo was a good idea, just that the stuff that the lady in jasts video was putting in her unfortunate vehicle as biodiesel was, if anything, worse than the wvo it started as. Also meant to say that merely starting an engine is not proof that you made good clean biodiesel at high yield. It is not a suitable test of product quality. A better test would be running the engine for years then looking at its gaskets; that would tell how much you had actually improved the wvo.
It may be that I am missing the point; if the idea is to show that you can recycle something that is essentially garbage, obtainable cheap and often free, and burn it in an engine, even if only once, then of course it would not do to use clean veg oil as a start because that makes no economic sense, it costs more than the diesel.
The idea of the continuous flow is that the actual kinetics of transesterification are really fast, the reason making biodiesel takes hours and hours is in the really poor contact between methoxide and oil when you mix them with a paddle and electric drill, as people do. If the reaction mix is emulsified, the reaction takes place much faster for same reason finely divided chemicals generally react faster. (term for this is micromixing). There are other reasons for higher efficiency, surprised that continuous never caught on. Some of the reactors are too fancy for us, but some are quite makerspace-makable, I think more so than having hundred-gallon process equipment. We could profitably make dieel from wvo, but on that scale I think it would be extremely advisable to use at least a two-stage process and not just filter the wvo to remove BCBs (burnt crunchy bits) but also chemically clean up things like free fatty acids.
Anyway, large scale diesel would need someone really committed to making all his own fuel. If there ever is such a person, I know a restaurant owner who has offered me his wvo for biodiesel. This page are some good processors, including one of the simplest continuous systems:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_processor.html#continuous
I would prefer to explain the chemistry without giving the impression that making fuel from trash oil is quite as easy as it is sometimes made to appear. Then someone wrecks their gaskets with bad biodiesel and it gives all of BD a bad rep.
Stop being pedantic, Walter!
Weâre talking making biodiesel in a 2 hour classroom setting. Not cloning dinosaurs a-la Jurrasic Park, waiting around for ANOTHER chance meteor strike, and then waiting some MORE for them to get squished into fuel! We donât HAVE that kind of time!
But just think what a wonderful end that would be for all the lawyers!
P.S. Will not all of our cemetaries turn into petroleum eventually. Instead of soylent-green,perhaps we could have soylent-gas for our cars.
They will not, as those bodies decay before their juices can be pressed into oil.
Thatâs why you need to add the secret ingredient: chance meteor strike, SUDDENLY burying everything in tons of dust.
Er, at least, thatâs how I understand the science behind dino-oilâŚ
OK Walt, technically all this carbon was probably biologically fixed, (if we discount Goldâs abiogenic hypothesis) but of course when people refer to biofuel they generally mean freshly fixed carbon using say last years sunshine instead of borrowed permian sunshine.
I just love wood gas, I feel there is an overlooked revolution here. Worldwide, charcoal is a huge source of energy, especially in africa. Primitive methods of making charcoal discard the 40% of total energy of the wood that is in the wood gas. Capturing that gas from efficient kilns and using it to run generators would supply enough electricity to match the total electrical production of those countries. I could see some kind of deal where utilitiies work with small-scale charcoal producers to accept biomass, give them their charcoal free, and payoff is in woodgas.
Ages ago - WVO was very popular in a dual tank set up with the bullet proof MBenz late 1970âs to about 1999 diesels and pre 2004 VW and Audi diesels and others, with either a homemade set up or one like âGrease Carâ still sells online.
Ten? ish years ago - that ever so shitty government of state of California complained that WVO users were not paying their share of fuel taxes per gallon and made it a point that WVO could only be used âoff highwayâ âŚjust think how many of those morons are flocking to Texas (ugh)
There were many BIodiesel home refiners - I knew a guy in plano that had a continuous operation in his slippery home garage during the early reign of Obama and his $4/gallon fuel âŚbut as fuel prices dropped it wasnât worth the time. I do wonder what he did with the last couple of 55 gallon drums of methanol.
Either my 1980 VW Diesel truck or my 2003 turbo diesel VW would be good candidates for bio or wvo.
Mix it 50/50 with Boones farm and serve it to your in laws when they visit?
I wouldnât be surprised if that is what happened to his wife - they supposedly got divorced and she vanishedâŚ
Will not cause any serious harm if mixed with ethanol (Boones Farm)
Does cause a nasty hangover, though. DAMHIK
You know, I am probably the one who misunderstood Josh. He has been quite quiet on this thread, but he may very well have intended to âmake people interestedâ at a very general level. That is, âhook the interests of âlooky loosâ and have a larger audienceâ.
Not at all a fan of that, I would prefer to do everything possible to discourage them not attract them. I hoped for a class to attract interest and participation from quite different people, the kind who are participating in this thread, people who might be inspired to do some serious making. I am thrilled by the level of discourse I see on this thread, and discovering individuals like TLAR who has actually made BD and clearly connected to the biodiesel community. That is a maker community if there ever was one.
The class was Joshâs proposal, not mine. If his aim is enlightening/entertaining the masses, that is what it should be. And Jast is quite right that running a motor from really ugly fuel would be the best way to get oos and aahs from that crowd. Getting a motor at $500 just for that one class seems high to me, however.
Wonder if there is a way to borrow or rent an engine just for the class?
Josh, please comment.