Anyone make Biodiesel Before?
366896
Bio diesel is pretty easy to make.\n\nAll you need is vegetable oil, methanol and lye.\n\nI haven't made any, however you need to make sure there's no water in the oil because it will gel up.\n\nWatch out though, the lye is highly corrosive and will burn your skin and the fumes can kill your lungs.\n\nBest bet is to have someone who knows what they're doing do it for you, or buy some already made bio-diesel.
729082
An interesting site talking about ethanol:\n\nhttp://e85.whipnet.net/ethanol.faq/make.ethanol.html
300916
Not quite the answer you are looking for but, there is a great article in this month's Popular Mechanics about the truth about BioFuels.  It has a great comparison of the above...
20827
Well first I would say go buy an issue of diesel power mag from your local walmart or trucks mag has duramax stuff also. You can get all kinds of programmers for them to increase power but you need to do alot of reading online to full understand how diesels work and what to do and what to not do to them. I gave you a link there, there are 3 different generations on them so you pick which ever forum is appropriate. Those people on there are very helpful. Hope I was helpful!
168898
I'm guessing you are asking how to make BIODIESEL from vegetable oil. Here is my answer to that:\n\nThe process is quite simple. Alchohol and vegetable oil or some other similar fat are mixed with the catalyst. It can be used animal fats or vegetable oils. The alchohol can be methanol or ethanol. Methanol is generally cheaper since it is made in industrial quantities from petroleum. Sodium hydroxide (aka lye or caustic soda) or potassium hydroxide are mixed in as the catalyst.\n\n1. Methanol and sodium hydroxide are combined making sodium methoxide.\n2. Sodium methoxide is mixed and stirred with vegetable oil (trigycerides). The oil molecules break apart and this produces methylesters and glycerol. The glycerol and catalyst will settle to the bottom as they are both denser than the methylesters. The methylester is drained off after the reaction is complete, about 8 hours.\n3. The methylester (biodiesel) is washed by mixing it with water. The water dissolves any traces of the catalyst and the alchohol. After settling for a few days the water can be drained from the bottom of the tank.\nThe glycerol can be filtered and purified as well. It can be burnt as fuel, or it makes a powerful degreaser (it is already almost soap) and can be made into high quality soap.\n\n*******************************************************\nIf your question is actually how to REFINE CRUDE VEGETABLE OIL into refined vegetable oil, then here are the steps:\n1. Oil extraction from seeds using pressing, solvents, or both (e.g. high quality virgin olive oil is pressed, while lower quality pomace uses solvents to extract)\n2. oil refiining: the crude vegetable oil is mixed with sodium hydroxide which removes the free fatty acids by forming soap\n3. bleaching: this removes pigments by adding a 'bleaching clay' and then filtering the clay\n4. deoderization: this removes volatile compounds and is often done by heating and distillation\n5. fractional crystallization: this is separation of solid fats by allowing the oil to solidify at cooler temperautes\n6. winterization: often some oils must have the fats which solidfy at low room temperatures removed. The oil is cooled and the solids filtered out. \n7. hydrogenation: this binds hydrogen to the unsaturated fatty acids and prevents later oxidation and can be used to make the oil solid\n8. texturing: this is a process where cooled fats are whipped to add some air and improve the texture and appearance, used for shortening\nhttp://www.markets.duke.edu/student_it/soc142_spring2002/team4/sustaining.html
908417
Ha ha... we just use vegetable oil... :-)
144442
*Hunting a lil bit* Biodiesel refers to any diesel-equivalent biofuel made from renewable materials such as vegetable oils or animal fats. Several different kinds of fuels are called biodiesel: usually biodiesel refers to an ester, or an oxygenate, made from the oil and methanol, but alkane (non-oxygenate) biodiesel, that is, biomass-to-liquid (BTL) fuel is also available.\n\nBiodiesels are biodegradable and non-toxic, and have significantly fewer emissions than petroleum-based diesel (petro-diesel) when burned. Biodiesel functions in current diesel engines, and is a possible candidate to replace fossil fuels as the world's primary transport energy source.\n\nProduction\nChemically, biodiesel comprises a mix of mono-alkyl esters of long chain fatty acids. The most common form uses methanol to produce methyl esters as it is the cheapest alcohol available, though ethanol can be used to produce an ethyl ester biodiesel and higher alcohols such as isopropanol and butanol have also been used. Using alcohols of higher molecular weights improves the cold flow properties of the resulting ester, at the cost of a less efficient transesterification reaction. A byproduct of the transesterification process is the production of glycerol. A lipid transesterification production process is used to convert the base oil to the desired esters. Any Free fatty acids (FFAs) in the base oil are either converted to soap and removed from the process, or they are esterified (yielding more biodiesel) using an acidic catalyst. After this processing, unlike straight vegetable oil, biodiesel has combustion properties very similar to those of petroleum diesel, and can replace it in most current uses.\n\nBase oils\nSoybeans are used as a source of biodiesel\nA variety of biolipids can be used to produce biodiesel. These include:\n    * Virgin oil feedstock; rapeseed and soybean oils are most commonly used, though other crops such as mustard, palm oil, hemp and even algae show promise;\n    * Waste vegetable oil (WVO);\n    * Animal fats including tallow, lard, yellow grease and as a byproduct from the production of Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil.\n\nWorldwide production of vegetable oil and animal fat is not yet sufficient to replace liquid fossil fuel use. Furthermore, some environmental groups (notably the Natural Resources Defense Council), object to the vast amount of farming and the resulting over-fertilization, pesticide use, and land use conversion that would be needed to produce the additional vegetable oil.
1133873
yes its possible. yes a few people have already done it.\n\nit takes 24 volts DC (2 car batteries) passed across a pair of platinum electrodes within a vessel of deionized water. you must exclude all air from the vessel prior to starting the process. also there must be a divider within the vessel so that when the hydrogen and oxygen separate (one gas type bubbles up from each electrode)\n\nnow you can compress the hydrogen and use it as fuel. (it takes 5 psi to run in a standard carberated engine)\n\nOR\n\nyou can store hydrogen in beryllium as it absorbs H2 readily at high pressures and releases H2 at low pressures for use with a fuel cell and because it is trapped in a block of metal no O2 can get to it to cause it to burn in storage.\n\nnow here is the problem with using this as a wide spread fuel.\nit takes more energy to create it than it puts out. unless you want to build a big solar array to convert a little water, it just doesn't fly.\n\nnow some people are working with collecting H2 emissions from some varieties of algae. now that looks promising.
741925
Here is a project you could do regarding lubricants here http://www.col-ed.org/cur/sci/sci128.txt  or check out the Exxon-Mobil education website http://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/public_pa/WorldwideEnglish/CorpCitizenship/SciEdu/OC_citizen_science.asp or this link for Exxon-Mobil http://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/public_pa/WorldwideEnglish/CorpCitizenship/SciEdu/OC_citizen_science.asp
111534
For starters, if you don't have a diesel motor, you would have to change motors.  Then there are things that you have to do to the diesel motor to get it to run on biodiesel.
239808
you can make virgin coconut oil at home. i saw the procedure in this website
727624
Make a small scale ethanol still.  Lots of instructions on the net.  Kind of a hot topic with all the discussion of alternative fuels.
647069
THEY ALREADY DO! (and have been)\n\nAll branches of the US military, NASA, several state departments of transportation and many public utility fleets use biodiesel. \n\n\nI saw info on it a while ago.\n\nTo verify this I searched the net and found you a few press releases and some sites with info on the US Militarys Biodiesel Usage.
654418
How about a friggin car you can run on food waste?  I'm tired of paying rich bastards who play price fixing games making money off me.  Ethanol or Methanol sound like a better alternative if we can all start making our own fuel without blowing up a few city blocks.\n\nSaw a news bit about a water-fueled motor the other day...\n\nJust read that answer above.  170 miles on a cell?!?  Are you freakin' kidding me?!?  My 113hp/69ft. lb motorcycle with a 4.5 gal tank does over 200 miles!  AND, it does wheelies!
323031
There are many ups and downs but most importantly in my opinion it's all about the cost.\n\nBut here are some tid bits....\n\nEthanol is a much cleaner fuel than petrol (gasoline):\n\n-It is a renewable fuel made from plants \n-It is not a fossil-fuel: manufacturing it and burning it does not increase the greenhouse effect \n-It provides high octane at low cost as an alternative to harmful fuel additives \n-Ethanol blends can be used in all petrol engines without modifications \n-Ethanol is biodegradable without harmful effects on the environment \n-It significantly reduces harmful exhaust emissions \n-Ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide levels more than any other oxygenate: by 25-30%, according to the US EPA \n-Ethanol blends dramatically reduce emissions of hydrocarbons, a major contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer \n-High-level ethanol blends reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 20% \n-Ethanol can reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by up to 100% on a full life-cycle basis \n-High-level ethanol blends can reduce emissions of Volatile -Organic Compounds (VOCs) by 30% or more (VOCs are major sources of ground-level ozone formation) \n-As an octane enhancer, ethanol can cut emissions of cancer-causing benzene and butadiene by more than 50% \n-Sulphur dioxide and Particulate Matter (PM) emissions are significantly decreased with ethanol. \n\nBackyard ethanol\nAs with biodiesel, you don't have to be a corporation to make ethanol -- you can make fuel alcohol in your backyard, and many people are doing just that, and running their vehicles on clean-burning alcohol instead of gasoline.\n\nIt's more equipment-intensive than biodiesel. You need a still, and you need to learn how to ferment beer. You can build your own still, and there's good information available to help you learn what you need to know.\n\nYou'll find everything you need in our Resources section and in the Biofuels Library.\n\nGet great advice and share information on the Biofuel mailing list -- the biggest and fastest growing alternative fuels mailing list on the Internet.\n\nPermits: In the US, home brewers need to get a "small fuel producer" permit from the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).\nhttp://www.ttb.gov/alcohol/permits.htm\n\nHow does it work?\nEthanol is a very high octane fuel, replacing lead as an octane enhancer in gasoline.\n\nFuels that burn too quickly make the engine "knock". The higher the octane rating, the slower the fuel burns, and the less likely the engine will knock.\n\nWhen ethanol is blended with gasoline, the octane rating of the petrol goes up by three full points, without using harmful additives.\n\nAdding ethanol to gasoline "oxygenates" the fuel, adding oxygen to the fuel mixture so that it burns more completely and reduces polluting emissions such as carbon monoxide.\n\nEthanol and ETBE oxygenator, made from ethanol, are much safer than the toxic and polluting MTBE fossil-fuel-derived oxygenator used by oil companies. \n\nProduction\nEthanol fuel production is a good locally-based industry, providing local jobs and a market for local materials, and helping to keep money and investment within the community. That's why so many of the farming states in the US (and Canada) back ethanol fuel.\n\nOne ethanol plant owned by farmers in Minnesota processes 11,751 bushels of grain a day to produce 33,990 gallons of ethanol and 95 tons of high-protein livestock feed.\n\nIf you happen to have a spare acre in your back yard, you can raise enough maize to make enough ethanol to drive even a gas-guzzling Land Rover (17.5 miles per gallon) about 5,000 miles, along with enough animal feed to help keep you in eggs and chicken.\n\nIf the climate favours sugarcane, an acre's worth will take you nearly 15,000 miles. A few fruit trees would help a lot too. You could put the by-product in a digester, along with other organic wastes, to produce met
1022621
Bio-diesel is a clean burning alternative fuel produced from domestic, renewable resources. It contains no petroleum, but it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a bio-diesel blend. Bio-diesel can be used in compression ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modifications. It is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics. An important point to make is that bio-diesel is NOT the same thing as raw vegetable oil. It is produced by a chemical process which removes the glycerin from the oil.\n\nBio-diesel is produced by chemically re-acting an alcohol (usually methanol) with vegetable based oils, animal fats or waste cooking oils, using either sodium or potassium hydroxide as a catalyst. It is made through a process called transesterification whereby the glycerin is separated from the fat or vegetable oil. The process leaves behind two products: methyl esters (chemical name for bio-diesel) and glycerin (a valuable byproduct usually sold to be used in soaps and other products).\nOil for bio-diesel can come from any vegetable oil crop.  Therefore product can come from anywhere in the world that has crops (i.e. palm, coconut, corn, Soya bean).
561119
- Test for fuel efficiency by burning different fuels by lighting the source and measuring how long it takes for water to reach a certain temperature.\n\n- temperature/conductivity experiments where you conduct electricity through different metals and measure Amps at different temperatures.\n\n- distill motol oil into all its components and talking about each and how it's really bad for the environment