have about 500 litres of it that we were hoping against hope to use
as a winter heating fuel, but that seems to be out (see previous).
First of all, this "Turk"-type burner here:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_processor10.html
Journey to Forever 90-litre processor
Scroll down a bit more than halfway to "The pre-heating tank".
"On the right is our "Turk"-type burner, which burns raw by-product
from the biodiesel process. It burns very hot! It's made out of a
sawn-off fire-extinguisher, 4" in diameter, a stainless steel mug
(the wick), and a curry can. The fuel reservoir is salvaged from a
dead kerosene space heater, the "squirrel-cage" fan from a dead
kerosene water heater. It takes less than an hour to heat 60 litres
and uses 700 ml of by-product to do so. The outlet (lid) of the fuel
tank has a valve that keeps a constant level of fuel in the reservoir
below; connected by a 1/4" copper pipe, the same fuel level is
maintained in the burner."
The fuel tank level solves the problem of continuous feed, but it
doesn't really help - it burns for about 45 minutes or so, which is
enough to pre-heat the oil, but then it gets so gunged up with sticky
black stuff that it chokes itself to death and has to be cleaned out
before you can continue. Which is why there's not more information
about it at our site - useful, but limited.
I don't think any Turk burner can get hot enough to burn this stuff
without getting gunged up.
I see lots of talk about Babington burners, but, please tell me if
I'm wrong, from what I can make out what those people mostly seem to
do is fiddle about with them. At any rate I don't plan to fiddle with
Babington burners and tiny holes in doorknobs and so on.
I'll build another burner unit like the adapted Mother Earth burner
described in the previous post, with a forced-air supply like the
first one, but much smaller. I've got an empty acetylene tank
(oxy-acetylene) about 9" diameter, and I'll use that, cut down, with
the air-pipe going in the side instead of the top and a 6" hole cut
in the top for the heat to emerge so it can be used as a stove. I'll
use it with 5% meth "biodiesel" to heat the by-product for methanol
reclamation. You get most of the methanol back by the time the temp
reaches about 105 deg C; to get all of it you'd probably have to take
it up to about 150 deg C. Up to now, for us at any rate, even 105 deg
C has meant more energy input than the reclamation is worth. But this
way it's more or less free, so it would be worth it. Our biodiesel is
an economic proposition anyway, even without reclaiming the methanol,
so any methanol reclaimed is jam on the top, if it can be done
cheaply. We should get enough methanol back to make about 600 litres
of 5% biodiesel, lots of winter heat for nothing.
We might also use the stove for pre-heating the oil for biodiesel,
but on the other hand our "roarer" pressure stove running on
biodiesel does that very well, and probably with less fuss - there's
not a lot of room there at the pre-heating tank, and the burner will
be much bigger than the pressure stove, especially with its fuel tank
and the fan.
So much for the methanol, but the question remains of what to do with
the rest of the by-product.
Separating it into its components with phosphoric acid would give us
FFAs (which might burn well in the forced-air burner), plus
industrial grade glycerin, plus potassium phosphate salts - chemical
fertiliser, but we don't have any use for chemical fertiliser, we
don't have a market for the glycerine, and phosphoric acid is
expensive. And we'll have removed the methanol by then, so it won't
separate anyway (though we could separate it first and reclaim the
methanol from the glycerine portion). Separation's here, by the way:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_glycsep.html
Separating glycerine/FFAs
I'm sceptical of claims that people make soap out of it of a high
enough quality to sell. Anyway we use KOH, not NaOH, so the
by-product is always liquid and I don't think it could be made into a
solid bar soap. No doubt you can make soap out of it that works okay
but isn't good enough to sell, but that would be far more soap than
we could ever use. As a cleaner and degreaser it's effective but it's
very caustic, rough on the hands. We're working on a soapmaking
process that we hope will give us a liquid product that's as
effective as a degreaser but won't be so harsh.
Even so, we don't expect that will account for very much of our
by-product production. Now the weather's warming up and the soil's
coming to life again I'll start a series of tests on composting it
and adding it to soil direct, not so much as a disposal method but to
see if it can be done with benefit to the compost and to soil
fertility. I'm not sure how this will work out, but I want better
information than what seems to be available, that you can dispose of
it via composting if you mix it with enough dry, brown stuff and it's
only a proportion of the pile. We set a premium on compost quality,
and I want to know what effect it has and how it can be optimised.
What we're most interested in is using it in biogas production. A
previous reply to Pannirselvam in Brazil:
Our biofuel members has the knowlede to jointly develope this small
biomass refinary concept first.Yet practical optimized design need
to be done and some comunity should com forward to test and improve
this integrated design. Let us all join hand and make this as
simple and easy to make this biorefinary that can be run in
villages.
Count me in - a project for this summer for JtF (I hope).
Here's Pan's full message:
http://wwia.org/pipermail/biofuel/Week-of-Mon-20050228/006371.html
And the whole thread:
http://wwia.org/pipermail/biofuel/Week-of-Mon-20050228/thread.html#6368
It started with my forwarding an email I received from a visitor to
our website who works at a wastewater treatment plant:
Here's another use of glycerin: Our treatment is accepting the glycerin
from a biofuel producer, we feed it to our digesters, slowly very slowly.
The addition of glycerin has dramatically increased our gas production,
that we run all three engines that produce electricity for our plant and
occasionally need to flare off the excess methane (we have 4 flares).
That was separated glycerin from a commercial producer. We need to
know how the unseparated by-product, the whole glycerin-catalyst-soap
cocktail, can best be used.
Further to which, for those among us who don't have gardens or the
space for biogas units or whatever, there was this at the Burnveggies
List a couple of months back:
"this may be a dumb question, but the more i look into glycerine
disposal options, the more i think it ought to be fine to just dump it
down the drain. unlike veg oil, it does mix with water. and according
to MSDSs available online, it's biodegradable and non toxic (LD50
12-27g/Kg in rat). so if it get all the methanol out, what's the
problem? am i missing something? i realize it's not pure glycerine,
but the impurity is soap, and there are already literally tons of soap
going down bay area drains everyday. so i don't see how an extra 15
gallons of glycerine/soap per week is going to mess anything up. but
maybe i'm missing something."
With this reply:
"Yeah, that's the conclusion I came to, along with the advice of a
friend who worked for the SF water department, who said that it was
just fine, and would just digest along with all the poop and other
stuff, and even said that they intentionally put methanol in the
sewer water to encourage certain bacteria. I did it for a few years,
but kept kinda quiet, 'cause it sounds so bad: "yeah, I just dump the
sh*t in the drain" just doesn't sound very earth buddy, but I
actually think it's just fine. How about an anonymous call to the
local water dep to see what someone says?"
But if that's what you do or want to do, you should check with your
local water department first.
Best wishes
Keith Addison
Journey to Forever
KYOTO Pref., Japan
http://journeytoforever.org/
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