Diesel fuel decontamination

Look up bio diesel and make your own fuel it will be much better quality. You will need to find a source of used cooking oil/fat. Is methanol available? Also caustic soda (lye) sodium hydroxide. Then you need a reaction vesel size to suit. I will leave you to look up the rest.

Brainwave,

Many thanks and we are working on bio fuels but we do not yet have a viable solution. In the main we are determined that coconut oil will be the solution but as I said, not as yet. Yes, we have too many coconuts and no, we do not have enough oil.

Yes, the cetain value of coconut oil is just 2 points south of regular Deisel.

What we have right now is badly polluted deisel which for the time being, I just want to 'clean' so we can turn the bloody lights on.

You see, the value after subsidy of 1 litre of deisel in Indonesia is about 40 cents US. The average monthly wage is US$25. So you can see the need for individuals to dilute the fuel and increase their take in.

Remember also that Indonesia is right up there as the most corrupt country in the world so these thing we take for granted (ie GOOD QUALITY FUEL is nothing there)

My friend Wally in Oz takes the pickup for a run past the fish and chips shops from Ballina to Coffs and comes back with about 800 litres of used cooking oil which he makes into biofuel.

Then the tax office came to his house and insisted he pay excise duties on the fuel.

Go figure...

Back to the matter at hand... has anyone got suggestions for fuel scrubbers?

Many thanks

Mark

The best immediate answer is to put the fuel into a tank where you can let the water fuel separate out and siphon off the diesel, charcoal will absorb other fractions.

I will have to add more later I have got better info to come but it is now rather late 1:00 AM. I know the americans had to decontaminate fuel during WW11 because of enemy action. There is an idea buzzing in my head but I have to go to sleep to bring it out. bye for now I will be back soonest.

You may be dreaming about decanting using a tank with a conical bottom as your decanter.

Then you may also be thinking of a 10 micron filter for the sediment and other particles.

The best investment you can make is in Racor diesel fuel filter units, they are the best in the world as far as this diesel mechanic is concerned and they have large volume filtration filters also-which is what you need in your situation. Water and dirt in diesel fuel settles out to the bottom of a "Racor" diesel fuel filter due to the diesel fuels higher specific gravity. They also make filters for gasoline as well.

The first thing to do is to let the fuel set and seperate. The water will settle out. drain the water off. Next would be a heater of some kind to run the fuel thru and bring it up to a temprature warm enough to evaporate any remaining moisture. Then filter it with increasingly smaller filters down to 5 microns.You could then add a fuel additive like alcahol. If veggie oil is readily available to you, Check out Greasecar.com to see if you can pick up some ideas from them.

Mark,

I understand your problem,I am sending you information to your address given.

best

Robert Ferreiro

Kenya

The question really is what volumes are we talking about. The more static type processes will only handle relatively small volumes compared to a centrifuge. For my money I would be looking at both. Centrifuge initially to remove water etc, then the good ol trusty Racor..you might need to use a few in parallel to handle the volumes. Some years back there was a very good filter system using (wait for it) toilet paper rolls, squeezed end to end into a canister. Seemed to work very well. Might be a "cheap" option??

Mark,

What you did not indicate was the volume of product you require to be cleaned and in what industry the product might be used.The toilet roll system has come a long way and is a OEM fit in South Africa for Cat.The Racor filter is the same asthe DAHL and will remove water but kerosene that is not so simple..Would you say what generator set you have and I can get the correct information to you.

Best

Robert Ferreiro

Kenya

Gentlemen,

Thanks for your comments all of them pertinent as usual.

Volumes:

Site 1: 1 x John Deere 6125 400 HP 72 l/hr in standby, but can use 700 l/day depending on power outages.

Site 2: 2 x MTU 396 2000 HP about 300 l/hr each currently using 1,200 l/day, everyday (charter ops)

Coconut oil is available but not in the quantities or for the same cost as diesel. Methanol is readily available (get's distilled into ethanol "Arak" the local deadly brew J ). Cooking oil is available but messy to organise collection etc but I'm prepared to go down that road as it does make sense.

A weekly tank of 5,000 litres is on each site. Site 1 could allow settling out of the water content (and some sediment I expect) however site 2 is too busy (ship port) with a weekly refill. The MTUs already have centrifuge units which are filthy within a week or so. Causes big problems.

Robert is suggesting Dahl units and 1 micron filtration which makes sense at injector level. Skippy is suggesting centrifuge first before Racors (and possibly toilet rolls) and Phil in Oz is saying RCI filters. Hilltopper's idea of warming it up to evaporate off remaining moisture is good and I'll try that by painting both weekly tanks black as they're sitting in the sun. Brainwave's idea to separate off the water is good and I can implement that pretty quickly.

I think in the end a multi pronged approach is viable whereby first as much water & crud is sedimented and evaporated out of the weekly tanks. [I can add a new tank to the ship port to give one tank time to do this while the other is in use.]. Then add something like the RCI unit on the day tank fill line to remove the water and 95% of the dirt.

Only thing left to sort out is how to filter the balance down to 1 micron and get rid of the contaminants like kero and toluene etc

Like I said before all you need a a big enough RACOR fuel filter system and you will have no problems- all that is necessary is for you to plumb a dual flter system in parallel to take take of both generators and have a good supply of filters on hand to maintain the system.

By plumbing the filters in a series parallel this allows you to change one filter while the other is filtering fuel and when the other filter needs service all that is needed is to turn off the ball valve change that filter assembly by draining off the water and dirt all you need to do is order twin RACOR filters with extended bases/drains to allow for more collection of sediment and water etc. the RACORs have a little turbine in them that pushes the fuel through them and forces the dirt and H2O to the bottom and the sediment drain works manually to allow for draining off water and dirt with out losing the fuel to the point where it will get ait in the fuel lines.

Regading the storage tanks you should change the fuel suction lines to a top draw unless you already have that as the water and dirt will settle to the bottom due to its specific gravity.

if the above is done as I have suggested you wil have fewer problems. the problem with using oils other than diesel fuel is that they will eat up the rubber components in the fuel systems so that is a no win situation.

Here is another possibility that I came across http://www.oilfiltrationsystems.com/coalescer_systems.htm .

The toluene will evaporate quite quickly even at normal temperatures but some heat will help. Pumping through filters purpose made or home brewed next, then centrifuge to seperate the diesel kerosene. Store and settle 2 days pump out the fuel. See what you can do about the dodgy supplier. 10 years in the cooler?

I would like to endorse all the comments I've seen so far. I would also like to add that centrifuges work really well for removing contaminates but they do work best when they are kept clean. We use to have apprentices clean them on a daily basis. This ensured operational performance and an education for the offending apprentice.

We often had a problem with sea water contamination and by mixing fresh water with the oil and centrifuging it was vastly removed.

My experience has been that fine particle contamination is hard on injectors, particularly GM unit injectors.

If you have been running on rough fuel for a while it may well be worth while checking you lubricating oil for fuel contamination. Incomplete combustion and contaminates can lead to ring wear and blow-by. Fuel contamination of the lube oil can lead to crankcase explosion. This can be very messy, especially in ships engine rooms.

It seems to me that the real problem you have is not the contaminants in the fuel but the quantities and diversity of those contaminants.

A little water in the fuel, is not in itself, a terrible problem and is quite common. In fact, during the refining process, diesel oil is routinely washed using watter to remove some contaminants like salt and other water soluble substances. It can easily be settled out in the day tank.

Water can sometimes be beneficial in the fuel as it reduces the operating temperature and increases the cylinder pressure at the same time. However it must be used properly.

A little benzine, toluene, in the fuel is not a problem either, timing and fuel ratios can be easily adjusted to compensate for the presence of these and like aromatic hydrocarbons. They do not need to be removed.

Solids and 'sludge' are another problem and must be removed through filtration. One micron filtration is a bit extreme though.

If I were you, I would consider the following;

Filter the fuel as it is put into either a holding tank or the day fuel tank using a clay type filter such as bentonite. This will remove gross particulate and possibly serve to buffer the amounts of toluene and other aromatics in the fuel, depending on the particular bentonite that you use. but this is a minor advantage, the real purpose is gross removal of particulate.

Do not use a paper secondary filter if there is a lot of water, it will degrade the filter and eventually cause it's failure and will only exacerbate the problem.

Allow the filtered fuel to settle in the holding tank. Decant the diesel from this tank into the day tank.

Circulate the fuel in the day tank from top to bottom through a fuel homogenizer such as a MarTec Marine Fuel Mill. Take the fuel line for the engine from the output of this homogenizer through a regular diesel filter to the engine. Top up the day tank continuously from the decanter.

The homogenizer will essentially mix the diesel, and contaminants including any remaining water into a completely satisfactory fuel for these engines. This fuel will of course change over time, depending on the quantity and properties of the contaminants present in the fuel. This will allow you to make subtle changes to the engine timing and air-fuel mixture to compensate for the varying fuel properties. The engine will not hunt and you will have less maintenance.

Diesels will burn almost anything. In fact pulverised coal could be added to the fuel and put through the homogenizer and it would run the engine not only satisfactorily but very well. (especially true for lower RPM stationary engines.)

The above system could be automated using a heat content analyzer to adjust the air-fuel and injector timing but manual adjustments a couple of times per day running should work pretty well for your needs.

The only other solution that I see is to use a small distillation column to separate the various fractions of the fuel, water and other contaminants. This would be almost impossible to control on this small scale and would be a LOT of inconvenience.

So, make it work with what you have got by homogenising it and compensating for the slower changes in quality.

Good luck.

A good many very useful comments go before me.

If I may add two suggestions:

1) Taking the tank take off, say 100mm, above the bottom of the bulk tanks will allow for settlement and reduce the risk of water entering the feed pipe. A drain at the low point allows drain off of the water. That said, diesels will run quite successfully with small quantities of water. I am always impressed that our Mercedes engines have no water separating fuel filter whereas all the other models we operate have a fuel filter with water warning light.

2) An electric lift pump, or having the feed tanks very high, before the filters allows you to open the water drains in the filter bases at any time with the generators running to drain the water without risk of air entering the injectors.

Hope this helps

Hugh- this why I mentioned the Racor filter system and installing a top mounted suction line to the filter assembly etc. etc. Its a pretty sure thing the tanks are on the surface with or with out containment so fixing things is iffy and the quality of the fuel is not guaranteed etc. due to sellers cutting it with sea water etc.

That is why I suggested the multiple in series parallel plumbing with the oversized RACOR filter units with clear bowls to check for water and sediment and drain them every day or twice a day or more etc.etc.

Hello,

My current work assignment is in Iraq and we experience similar problems described in past post on Diesel.

The best luck we have is to receive fuel in one tank, let the water settle out and then we filter with a typical fuel filter, nothing fancy or expensive. WE also add motor oil to our fuel, about 1 gallon ( approx 4 liters ) to every 1000 liters or so.

Since our fuel is cut with kerosene also, and the refinery's here are running too hot we get something closer to avaition kerosene rather than diesel, I suspect you folks have some of the same problems. Anyhow when you add motor oil to the filtered fuel, you solve some lubricity problems and also some timing problems associated with a high flash point on lighter fuels.

We do everything we can by gravity here, slowly, this seems to get rid of the water fairly cheaply and when you are using inexpensive fuel filters they are far more effective if you gravity fuel through them. Much the same as you folks in Indonesia, in Iraq we run of generators quite often.

Hope this is helpful

Rick

I've often thought about putting used filtered motor oil in our diesel cars fuel as a way to get rid of it (we usually recycle it, but burning it in our vehicles seems like an economical use for it). Does anyone know if that it causes any problems, or to pollute excessively? I would think that it could only help the the fuel pumps and injectors last longer, (which is what the fuel additives that we use are supposed to do). But there are also a lot of metal particles and contaminants in there too that would need to be filtered out. I was thinking of ways to use cheap truck filters to continuously filter the used oil, to partially clean it. I suspect that in direct injected diesels could burn basically anything (maybe not well but...) and motor oil would just raise the ignition temperature.

And I agree with all the ideas posted above, especially RickinIraq's idea of adding the motor oil to it. Maybe letting the toluene and similar hydrocarbons evaporate is wasting energy, I wonder how much motor oil would need to be added to the fuel to counter the problems of pre-ignitition by the lighter fuels.

Nick

For attention of Tamu at Bali:

As you are living in a tropical island therefore where coconut grows and presumably is readily available, may I suggest (this is not a :scrubber) that you buy coconut oil. During and after the war it replaced fuel oil in Viet-Nam for the public electrical diesel-fired energy production. It does very well on slower speed diesels 300 to 750 RPM . It has been mixed with distillate for higher speed diesel engines. After experimenting with the poor quality diesel you are talking about the above will definitely be a "clean " additive and a lot better than sea-water !

It is reported to be very good as an anti-wear fuel. In particular for the: piston rings, though it is definitly not as efficient as industrial fuel oil which it does replace well.

Let us know how you are going

we have simylar problems in india with respect to diesel fuel.The soluation i recamend is use Centrifugal seperator between your bulk storage tank and Engine day tank Alafa laval manafactures the equipment which seperates water and other contimanents. in fact these seperators were part of both main propulision and generator engines on board Ships when i was serving on board ships, i have used these sepertoers in Electrical power generation plants equiped with Both Cummins and Caterpillar powerd engine driven genertors (5Mw continues duty)results are quite good.we saved a lot on maintainence cost as well as fuel filter replacement costs.

CRM

I worked in Alaska as an "Engineer" (it's a title not a a degree or license)responsible for the generation of electrical power sufficient to operate a rather large,very remote (400 miles to the nearest paved road) salmon processing operation. We had a couple hundred people to consume power and approximately 6 million pounds of fish to freeze. The fuel quality was somewhere between atrocious and muddy water. The installation of a centrifuge for fuel cleaning not only extended filter life, but gave us the level of reliable generation that I believe you seek. As a side note: insure that your post centrifugal cleaning is further supported by a dual filter bank that is properly plumbed to accommodate the changing of filters without the necessity of system shutdown.

Having lived in Chicago I found most people having problems with their fuel lines freezing with residual moisture on cold winter days. It was a fate I never suffered. I simply added some antifreeze (methanol based) with every tank full which mixed with the water & got burned off it the engine.

It also prevents corrosion in your fuel tanks.