On August 29, 2005 11:09 am, Stephen Cartwright wrote: > On the news last night there was a story about a guy that runs his car > evey day with used vegetable oil. He was using a modified diesel > engine ($1500 to $3000 modification). > > I can't remember if this was THE link that they showed on the news, > but it looks like the same idea at least: http://www.greasecar.com > > Just thought I'd throw that out there since it seemed to be on topic ;) > If I remember correctly, straight vegetable oil needs to have preheating equipment so that when the temperature drops below 6C the oil is still liquid. If you use biodiesel you get to about -12C before you need to add degelling agents. I may have the temperatures wrong as I am coming from memory and you all know how reliable that is. :^>
It be a commitment, but if you had a workshop to make biodiesel you could make it with almost any biological fat/oil and a little knowledge of chemistry. The only chemistry you would have to know would be how to perform a titration (grade 12 chem if I recall). All you have to do is do the titration to see how much methanol to use. Then you measure out the quantity of ethanol for the quantity of oil/grease, mix that with the oil, heat to 65C for 1/2 hour and watch glycerol precipitate out. Pour off the liquid and there's your diesel fuel. The remainder like I said is glycerol and that can be sold to Proctor and Gamble (sp?). Voila! In a commercial operation you would have a continuous feed and instead of letting it precipitate out you would spin it out leaving a great fuel. The properties of the fuel is that it is not poisonous in any reasonable quantity, that's what they mean by safer. In addition biodiesel burns with about 15% more heat by weight. OK. I realize this is waaaay off topic so I'll stop now and won't reply to the discussion if there is any followup. You can always email me off list. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
