Biodiesel class

Science
#13

I played with biodiesel for a while over ten years ago. Now it’s 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.

It’s 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 ‘diesel’ 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 won’t 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, I’ve seen systems for centrifugation of waste engine oil to reuse in the tank with diesel or to use as a heating oil.

I’d 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.

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#14

There are many folks that run old ATF in their diesels as well.

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#15

I have two other diesels than my commuter car…the 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 today’s low sulphur diesel but I wouldn’t put home brew in it without close scrutiny.

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#16

Aren’t 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/

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#17

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.

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#18

Stop being pedantic, Walter!
We’re 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 don’t HAVE that kind of time!

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#19

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.

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#20

They will not, as those bodies decay before their juices can be pressed into oil.
That’s why you need to add the secret ingredient: chance meteor strike, SUDDENLY burying everything in tons of dust.
Er, at least, that’s how I understand the science behind dino-oil…

#21

OK Walt, technically all this carbon was probably biologically fixed, (if we discount Gold’s 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.

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#22

Ages ago - WVO was very popular in a dual tank set up with the bullet proof MBenz late 1970’s to about 1999 diesels and pre 2004 VW and Audi diesels and others, with either a homemade set up or one like “Grease Car” 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 “off highway” …just 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 …but as fuel prices dropped it wasn’t 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.

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#23

Mix it 50/50 with Boones farm and serve it to your in laws when they visit?

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#24

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what happened to his wife - they supposedly got divorced and she vanished…

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#25

Will not cause any serious harm if mixed with ethanol (Boones Farm)

Does cause a nasty hangover, though. DAMHIK

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#26

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 “make people interested” at a very general level. That is, “hook the interests of “looky loos” and have a larger audience”.

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 Josh’s 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.

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#27

If you want a demonstration engine that could work for a long time on a liter of diesel

#28

Yeah, I forgot about all that nonsense that folks were making about not paying road taxes if you are making your own fuel. While I do understand the concern, the percent of folks doing it is so tiny and the the expense for the process is not insignificant.

My thought is “Give them a break. Surely they earn some good will by being an experimenter who is willing to recycle a bio waste into a useful product.” They could say the same for electric cars and road tax.

#29

I’m sorry what is the question?

#30

It’s my understanding the Cox engines do NOT use diesel FUEL. It’s unclear to me why they’re even called “diesel”, though they DO, sort of, use the diesel cycle (in juxtaposition to otto cycle or miller cycle, etc.).

#31

jast have we met? What is your name?

#32

I believe they use a form of kerosene, which I believe is somewhat compatible with diesel. They are compression engines with a glow plug.

It is a much cheaper and more appropriately sized demonstration engine. Might also get one free from the RC Plane folks.

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