BIO DIESEL

Do you remove all the water before adding the NaOH/methanol? Did you tritate the oil first to assure you have the right amount of NaOH?

I am not sure why you have phospholipids, but these are polar compounds that can be removed by wet-washing the biodiesel. There is quite a bit of discussion of water washing biodiesel on the Internet.

You will also get a lot of soap if your soybean oil has a large quantity of Free Fatty Acids, FFA, - these will convert into soap and solidify if too many. Quantitatively determine how much FFA you have in the oil and reduce the quantity drastically before undertaking the transesterification step.

Good luck

Phospholipidis are present in soy bean oil it is a cold fact of nature. Wet washing is where the problem start with polar compounds as water is one of them. The water will attach to the one side of a phospolipid and oil to the other side. This is how to make margarine and mayonnaise. Phoppholipids act as a binder between oil and water to form a gel like substance.

Does any body know who the author of this excellent piece of work is please respond

yOU might have a look around this forum: http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums

how bout some more details on the soy you are using:

Water content

FFA%

raw or refined

Water in the oil will produce soap during the conversion process

If your ffa is over say 5% your requirement for sodium hydroxide will increase & the ratio of glycerol/biodiesel also increase.

9amps at what voltage?

I can't stress enough how important it is to learn how to titrate & run a bunch of 1 liter batches. This will let you try to changes to various parameters & observe the different results. When it comes to separating out the phases time is your friend.

A good easy test to run on finished bio is combine 27ml methanol with 3ml unwashed bio. biodiesel that's ready to wash will have no drop out of unreacted oil or glycerol [thanks tilly]

It all depends on what you plan on doing with the bio as to how picky you are about the quality.

high quality biodiesel is going to take careful process control. The consistency of your feedstock & catalyst are key factors. Pre mixed methylate will lose potency over time.

potassium hydroxide [koh] is easier to use than sodium hydroxide [naoh].

the glycerol is thinner & easier to pump.

since koh is not as strong, accurate measurements are easier to make especially for smaller batch sizes.

Obviously an unrefined oil - you need to get rid of these contaminants (known as break) by warm water wash, some slight acidification could help. Further refinement will not be needed and the oil will be ok for biodiesel, All veg oils could need to get rid of this part - which gives raw oils their distinctive characteristics - before fiurther processing. You need what is known as non-break oil often used for making alkyds resins used for paint. Fully refined oils will work OK.

A market has emerged in the used oil business, and it is no longer available for free-take-away from restaurants etc (unless you have an old contract). Now people who want this resource must buy it, and this reduces the profit/saving by the use of it.

Additionally, there never was enough of this used oil to amount to enough to satisfy even 1% of the diesel market. Soon all those guys who bought these home rendering kits to make bio diesel to save big $$ are going to be very disturbed to find they cannot get free oil any more. Some company has installed a locked tank at all the restaurants in their area and grabs it all.

There have even been thefts from these locked tanks.

I'm in the UVO [used vegetable oil] business, as a means to acquire feedstock. One thing to consider is uvo was formally used to make animal feed & soap, so it does divert feedstock. The uvo market is forever changed. Growing enough oil bearing crops isn't feasible, algae has some promise. Similar to cellulosic ethanol, the key is the strains need to have certain traits to produce an affordable process.

I understand the urge to burn uvo directly for transportation or heating.

Uvo will increase the emissions & coking [carbon build up] & is technically an illegal modification of you fuel system.

Biodiesel is a good additive, especially for low sulphur diesel, bring the lubricity up & increasing injector life. Bio is a good solvent & will flush the crud out of your fuel system.

It's probably not the best idea for thousands of people to be playing with the dangerous chemicals involved in making biodiesel in their back yards & garages. I worry much more about the neurological effect of methanol exposure, than the flamability which is less than gasoline. The different hydroxides present their own very real burn hazards. always make sure to have plenty of running water available & ventilation, safety gear.....

The glycerol byproduct increases the methane output of a sewage plant.

Glycerol can be used to suppress dust on dirt roads & construction sites

glycerol can be ph adjusted & composted in to soil

as long as you remain under the requirements for agronomic application rates of BOD in the basin mgmt plan, or other groundwater management programs utilized by your government agencies (like the CV-RWQCB).

BTW, since i didn't notice anyone respond to this portion of the question yet, phospholipids are the phosphorylated fats that comprise the cell membrane of living organisms. They have a hydrophilic phosphate head and hydrophobic fatty tail that allow the formation of a membrane between two wet solutions.

100% screwed up - you need chemistry lessons

What chemistry is wrong?

Phosphorylated probably is not exactly the best way to say it, since it is actually a replacement of a fatty acid with a organophosphate compound in a fat. Strictly speaking you might consider phosphorylation purely as an addition of phosphate only, instead of the addition of any organophosphate at the phosphate head.

????

I never claimed to be a chemist?

I was just talking about the practical aspects of biodiesel & glecerol, as I understand them.

I am still not sure what exactly is he talking about. Initially I thought i a bit ambiguous about phospholipids, or maybe the formation of a bilayer membrane (though that one should be obvious). However, while there doesn't seem to be anything specific chemical mechanism described in your discussion, i guess as the general public uses the term chemcistry very broadly, he could be implying something about your discussion also. Though as a former chemist with a BS in chem, while ambiguous i do not see anything obviously wrong in your statements. He could be assuming the statement about burn hazards and hydroxides could directly imply you believe hydroxide will burn, which isn't the case, but hydroxides do present a burn hazard for chemical burns and the exothermic reactions could potential case flammable vapors to ignite, (though i have never actually mixed any sodium hydroxide solution that got hot enough to ignite flammable vapors except when adding conc. sulfuric/acetic/or hydrochloric acids). I am not sure what he believes is so substantially incorrect, and may need some clarification.

I was referring to chemical burns.

I was being very general.

I'm always happy to learn more.

Two questions come to mind reading this thread; are sunflowers easier to process into biodiesel than other oil crops, and what other alternatives are there to soybeans? What is the best oill crop?

Most plant oils are very similar and consist of a glycerin back bone with three fatty chains attached = triglycerides. Details here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil

Fuel use here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil_used_as_fuel

You can burn the oil in a diesel as long as you adjust it properly, and you may also need to keep the fuel system warmed a little in cold climates because these oils can crystallize.

They usually extract the glycerin to liberate the oil in a simple process. The basic oils are a better fuel, but some still need warming in cold climates. The byproduct glycerin needs to be used up and a fair amount of work has been done in using it as a feedstock for various applications, but the market is currently glutted and the price is low.

Oil yields depends on the climate, soil and water available. Palm oil seems to do best in tropical areas. In the north sunflowers do well, as do the canola and other plants.

A search will find huge amounts of information, orices , yields etc.

Well, I guess my next question is, can the glycerins be reincorporated back into the co-product feedstock that is left after extracting the oil and glycerin from it? Can it be added to alfalfa or another type of silage crop, to both eliminate the excess by-product and supplement the feedstock? Is there a potential mix of silage, glycerin and soy protein that constitutes a functional feedstock? And are there better alternatives to soybeans for this process, or do all the other oil crops have the same amount of residual by-products that need to be dealt with as part of the process? And wouldn't this approach help assuage the damaging effects the bio energy markets have had on the feedstock markets?

As a proponent of local-loop community-based bio-electrical production as the first use of biodiesel, ethanol and butanol, all serving as the fuel for back-up generators for locally-owned community wind turbines, (see http://lindsborg.blogspot.com/ ) I'm looking for the best feed formula to accomplish both necessities, so just wondered if the glycerine can be directly re-incorporated back into the feed cycle, after harvesting out the pure biodiesel.

This would best apply to the thousands of small rural communities in the US wind corridor(s), particularly, but once it is tested out and innovations can be discovered and implemented, it would work on a larger, city-size scale eventually.

But the glycerin by-product question seems to be one that has multiple answers, if we can just create and nurture that new market as the biodiesel market grows. Otherwise, we will see glycerin pools languishing in want of a market.

Yes, as long as the glycerin is animal food grade, it can find a home in feed.

lots here

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22animal+feed%22+%2Bglycerin&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

The methanol has to be removed from the glycerin to make animal feed and the methanol is highly combustible which is a safety concern from what I have heard. Glycerin does not make a good fuel in anyway found so far. AURI in Minnesota tried and had to blend it to get it to burn. The chlorine content is also very high in glycerin (hydrochloric acid potential when burning).

Jep,

Here is an interesting article from AURI in Minnesota. http://www.iomsa.org/leads/OMGjun07.pdf

This article worries about "Acrolein is a regulated toxin that forms when certain pollutants break down in outdoor air or from burning gasoline, turbine engine emissions, forest fires, spray painting, and other sources."

It does sound like they are using it in animal feed at low rates after the methanol is removed. I looked at glycerin to use when making fuel pellets but the chlorine levels are way to high and the BTU is to low to mess with. But don't worry, no one is flushing it down the drain. Animal grade glycerin was selling for over 20 cents/lb a year ago.

Russ

Russ

What I have observed is that there are many oil seed crops in the world. The cost of the crop produced is probably the main factor. Northern Europe and Canada use a lot of rape. They have a shorter growing season which dictates the use of rape. I was in the US soybean research field developing new varieties and the amount of oil produced per acre was never a factor. It was the bushels per acre. The protein found in soybeans was always considered the main ingredient and some seed companies did do some selection on protein levels. This may change somewhat if biodiesel becomes a major player. There are "no free puppies" in this world so if plant breeders select for higher oil they will have other issues to deal with.

Good luck

JEP raises a good point. But we seem to be going around in circles on this subject so let us un-complicate this a bit. All oils fats and waxes (animal and vegetable) are triglycerides. The fatty acid component can be split off and methylated so that they become fatty alcohols! These are biodiesel!

The manufacture of soap is very similar - the soap is an ester of the fatty acid and similar in many ways. Here, as with biodiesel, the glycerin goes down the sewer unless the cost of separating it can compete with synthetic (made from oil!) - I don't know if modern soap factories find it commercially viable but increasing oil prices may change this.

It seems a pity to lose this but unless we increase the demand for glycerin we are losing. The idea of converting it to a fuel grade is a good one - the ethanol/methanol might be a way but this is bio-petrol (or bio-gas if in the USA) so same difference in the end but better for cars.

The problem is that the lower cost oils are, due to commercial pressures, currently the most attractive but there are other non-edible oils such as castor and jatropha - maybe even linseed. By the way even animal fat could be converted into biodiesel.

I do not have access to the lab facilities but utilising the glycerin might be feasible. That would mean making what is called a monoglyceride, - one molecule of glycerin to one molecule of fatty acid (oils are 1 glycerin to 3 fatty acid). Glycerin is an alcohol as is methanol. I have a feeling that this could also make a diesel fuel if it has a low enough flash point.

Monoglyerides are made by reacting the glycerin with the oil (easy - most paint makers are it doing all the time to make their resins) but again the cost of recovered glycerin would be a question. Two plants could be used one making the fatty alcohol and the other the monoglyceride.

glycerin has three OH groups that can form bonds with acid.

This is called esterification and is analagous to acid-base neutralization.

Thus one glycerol can have three fatty acids joined to it = tri glycerides

My take thus far on this thread is that because the use of glycerin for feedstock offsets some of the losses in feedstock availability due to corn going into ethanol poduction, it would be the best way to approach this by-product. Apparently there are multiple answers to address the potential glycerin glut question, but it seems that the least refinment-intensive option would be to feed it directly to livestock as a viable and transportable percentage of their feed.

There's been a meat-quality study going on at Missouri U http://biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=1687 for about a year and a half now, I found references to the study but not the results. Anyone know what they came up with? How does a 5 to 15% glycerin levels in their feed effect meat and egg quality? The facts seem resolved, that the actual growth is no different from corn fed to glycerin fed, but how does it affect the meat quality? If the quality remains the same, then it seems that future biodiesel plants would incorporate this application directly into their start-up design.

Considering the fact that the ag business is the core of biodiesel production, it makes sense that the smartest tack is to send all the co-products out of the same plant in a finished form, meaning that not only should they be pumping biodiesel fuel at the source, but also sending out bales or bags of glycerine-enriched feedstuffs. By incorporating this "whole product" philosophy from the start, we can avoid some of the by-product disasters we see with the synthetic fossil-fuel-based chemical industry.

There is a residue problem as part of the process to remove the glycerol and free the oil ends up with some splitting of glycerol (3 carbon back bone) into ethanol(2 carbon backbone) and a 1 carbon residue that can show up as formic acid or methanol, both toxic and 100% water/glycerol soluble and hard to extract. If it gave pure glycerol = no problem, but a trace of formic acid or methanol makes the glycerol very toxic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formic_acid

one slip up and you are walking. Try using it in Wyoming too.

I wonder if the smog produced would make the entire place smell like french fries.

I always have trouble with the idea of using food to make fuel.

Surely we can develop a way of making fuel from waste products?

Using food seems a terrible waste.

Initially at these small scales it would be using waste cooking oil for fuel. Obviously this can not be done on a large scale, as you obtain very small quantities of oil from the total volume of plant materials grown (and it takes time to grow these oil producing plants). But as the waste oil from cooking our food tends to be a special probelm for municpalities to deal with in waste water systems, it is not bad to remove what we can and use to burn after it has been effectively employed for a primary use of food production. Also, the vegetable oil itself is not food, but rather something we use to make the texture of our food palatable and cook the food to be safe for consumption, so we waste nearly all of the oil after cooking is completed. Now if they want to use fresh vegetable oil , this would be problematic, because at that point they are competing with food production for both land to grow the oil crops and the oil itself for cooking. This is why biodiesel really would not be a primary energy source. It takes too much land out of food production, and generates a huge amount of waste plant tissue that must degrade and release gases to the atmosphere. (algal produced biodiesel might be a different story as the algae have a smaller tissue infrastructure, and produce recoverable oil in every individual cell).

Agree using waste oil no problem. I was jumping ahead to the "green energy" goal that so often talks of using agricultural surpluses for fuel.

Using waste such as straw, remnants from oil pressing etc looks a good idea and we should be pressing ahead with research into this area.

However, many of these materials, although they release CO2 as they decompose, are useful for retaining the structure and fertility of the soil. Removing them for fuel may not be as good an idea as it first seems.

If you examine desert soils, most are lacking organic matter to give a good structure to the soil. Consequently nutrients frequently leach out when attempts are made to irrigate it. Many deserts don't just lack water.