Alternative Fuels

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Because I love to make things work that are just a bit left field, I have been experimenting with alternative fuels. This is just a bit of a blog of what I am learning with them.

There appears to be a lot of miss information on the web about runing diesel engines on waste vegetable oil (WVO) or Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) in diesel engines that I suspect is either seeded by parties who stand to gain from that, or from keyboard experts who have never just tried it to see if it works.

Practical experience is golden.....

• At the 1900 World's Fair, Rudolph Diesel ran his engines on peanut oil
• Bio Diesel is difficult , expensive, and time consuming to make. (I tried to make it in small quanities and never got it right)
• An alternative to Bio Diesel is using straight vegetable oil or waste vegetable oil under certain conditions
• SVO & WVO run fine in most diesel engines when the oil is heated & the engine is warm (this is done to reduce the viscosity of the veg oil
• Various blends of veg oil will work in diesel motors without modification or pre heating. Depending on your climate a mixture of veg oil and diesel will work just fine where the VO:Diesel mixture doesn't exceed 50:50
• You can buy pretty much everything you need to start using veg oil in your diesel from ebay
• You should filter WVO to 5 micron or better (I filter to 1)
• WVO or SVO  (hereafter *VO) (Note -- this is the first use of the term *VO. A Google search of this term yielded no results in this context -- the current epoch time is 1210079894 which is 2318, 6th May, 2008) can be used to oil timber decking, diluted 1:1 with white spirate or other solvent (this helps thin the oil helping it soak in to the timber). The results are better and FAR FAR cheaper than using comercial decking oils
• Your exhaust gas will smell noticeably like a fish and chip shop (Deli if you are in South Australia), but it's not offensive
• It is great that people are sceptical of using *VO in their engints - this keeps the supply of WVO available for the rest of us
• Some countries do prohibit the use of *VO as fuel in a cynical and hypocritical move to raise funds from fuel tax at the expense of the planet and their constituants. People interested in running *VO should consider both the legal ramifications of their actions and the chances of being caught, compared to the cost and atmospheric benefit.
• Burning *VO is in fact atmospherically beneficial as it although it releases greenhouse gasses, they are the result of carbon  that was trapped by plants, and the emissions are always less than the original carbon trapped by the plants. Further, it's an act of re-cycling that takes very little energy to process, unlike other forms of re-cycling. If governments were serious about all of the green stuff then they would take practical measures, instead of trying to control greenhouse emissions by generating paperwork using the Kyoto protocoll.

January 2008

• Obtained 5.5 KVA single cylinder diesel generator for free to do testing with (Thanks Ricard)
• The thing was heavy (170 Kg) and hard to get home
• Did bugger all for quite some time

March 2008

• Ran the engine on WVO to see if it would work wih the least effort possible -- 30 miutes
  
  
  • Connected a coke bottle to the fuel system using a T piece in the fuel line
  • Warmed canola oil from the kitchen in the microwave
  • Started the engine using diesel from it's main tank, with the SVO oil line crimped with pliers
  • Once the engine was running and warming, moved the pliers from the SVO fuel line to the diesel fuel line, changing the source of fuel from diesel to SVO
  • Once testing was completed, reversed this to purge the fuel system of SVO

The results were un remarkable in that the engine ran perfectly on both fuels with no oticeable difference.

• Ran the engine under full load comparing SVO and diesel performance
  
  
  • Purchased a five litre plastic tank for diesel (because the return line from the injector pump goes back to the main tank)
  • Started engine on diesel using the fuel line crimping method
  • Loaded the engine using two 2400 Watt heaters
  • Ran two litres of diesel in the engine until it stopped, timing how long it lasted
    
  • Re-started the engine on 2 litres of SVO, running loaded and timed the endurance
  • left the SVO in the engine without purging
  • Tested cold starting on subsequent days

The performance was identicle for boh fuels, and endurance was not nmeasurably different between the SVO and the diesel.

The engine started perfectly, cold, on the following day, numerous times, at varying intervals.

The day after this the engine coughed a little but wouldn't start at all.

After the fuel system was blead of the SVO it started on diesel perfectly wih no down side.

• Solenoid Fuel Source Switching

  • Placed solenoind valves from Jaycar Electronics on the outlet of each tank

This worked for about three cycles, and after that the solenoid valves stopped working.

Because of the viscosity of the fuels a mor erobust electonic solenoid valve is rquired for *VO and diesel !!

• Heat exchanger on oil supply from exhaust system (Air cooled engines)
  
  
  • Coiled copper tube around the exhaust pipe by hand
  • Later added an inline pump

Initial testing showed that a pump was needed to pass the fuel through the copper heat exchanger, so added a small diaphragm pump

After that it all worked fine

• Onbtaining Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO)
  
  
  • Find a Source
  • Collect the oil

Here's where the fun began.

Finding the source was easy -- go to locak fish and chip shop that has plenty of deep fryers and ask if they had waste oil that I could have. Their response was that of course it was OK so long as I didn' want to make a terrorist bomb with it !!! This remark as crazy as it seems has been echoed by almost every fish and chip shop owner I have asked for oil from. This is not the place for me to get started on terrorism paronoia, but this does serve as an example as to how far his paronoya has gone when even a fish and chip shop owner in suburbia Auystralia is concerned that you might use their shitty waste oil to make a weapon, even though you can buy petrol and diesel at a service station !!!!! I digress......

Most fish and chip shops do have a company that regularly collects their oil, but they usually charge the shop to collect it, or at best take it away for free. They tend not to turn up all that regularly, much to the dis-satisfaction of the shop owner, who regularly finds their storage over flowing. Getting oil at this time isn't really a problem.

Collecting the oil requires two things - a storage vessel and a pump, as usually the waste oil is stored in an old 200 litre (44 gallon) drum. I started with a 20 litre beer fermenter as my storage vessel, and still use a boat bilge pump to pump the oil.

The 20 litre container rapidly becomes too small -- now I use two fifty litre fermenters instead. This size is convenient as its still a two person lift.

Although a small bilge pump works, it is slow due to the viscosity of the oil when it's not warm. It's best to use the largest bilge pump you can find.

No matter what you do, this process is oily and messy. Remember to take a generous amount of good rags with you. The oil is not so bad to work with as lets face it, just a few days before it was stored as waste it was deep frying your chips and edible!!!

The oil at the top of the tanks is no better than the oil at the bottom of the tanks

To ensure supply it is best to have a couple of places where you can pick up your oil from

• Filtering WVO 1.0
  
  
  • Obtain diaphragm pump
  • Pump WVO through filtration system
  • Triple filtration system comprising three filters - two course low cost inline fuel filters and one injection cartridge filter

Finding a pump was hard as some pressure is needed for inline filtering. Boat water pumps are diaphragm pumps, but they are expensive. I eventually found one that was cheap enough at a second hand marine parts shop.

The pump produced a lot of pressure but the filters soon clogged with a waxy substance. Heating the filters wih a fan heater allowed filtration to continue(grosely inefficient but it allowed the experiment to continue).

Total filtration using this method was about three litres before it was too slow to be worth going any further, and it took hours.

• Filtering WVO 2.0
  
  
  • Purchase bag style filters
  • Heat WVO in bag using fish tank filter
  • Use gravity filtration system made from beer fermenters

Since the in-line cartridge filter system didn't really cope and was quite expensive, a little exploring on ebay using the key words "WVO" soon came up with a number of good sources of filters that other people are using to filter Waste Vegetable Oil. For ten dollar per bag I soon had 2 x five micron, and 2 X 1 micron bag filters on their way to me by post for $ 10.00 each.

I put a 5 micron filter inside a 2 micron filter and suspended it on two pieces of wood above another beer fermenter, and then dropped the oil from the full (collection) fermenter in to the filter bag.
  

Progress was slow, so I put a fish tank heater inside the bag and this spead things up a lot, yet progress was still slow.

I have now purchased a 200 litre fermenter that stores my filtered oil, I collect the oil from the shops in the 50 litre fermenters, and transfer it fromthese manually to the smaller 20 litre gravity tank using the second hand diaphragm pump.

The gravity filtration system does a few litres per hour. It's slow, but cheap.

I am still on my first set of filter bags after about 150 litres, and the bags can be washed.

The same waxy substance is building up on the bottom of the bag that collected in the filters in 1.0, but the volume of the bag can handle it. When the fish tank heater is cold the waxy stuff sticks to it.

• Testing Filtered WVO (FWVO)
  • Ply heated FWVO to diesel generator under load

The FWVO worked in the diesel generator just as well as the SVO did, which was just as good as Diesel

April 1008

• Motor Vehicle Trial of FWVO in Motor Car -- 33% FWVO
  
  
  • Test 33% mixture of ambient temperature FWVO and 66% diesel in 19xx model Toyota hilux
  • Test carried out on 1/3 tank approx

There is a lot of chatter on the net about running blends. Since all that is needed to run *VO in a diesel engine appears to be a reduction in viscosity, then the easiest way to achieve this is to blend the *VO with solvent fuels (like Diesel) that have lower viscosity.

The result was that mixing 33% FWVO with 66% diesel was a complete success, the only difference being the exhaust smell.

One third of a tank was enough to know this was good, so we continued the test for a total of 700 KM of both city mileage, and country mileage, including at least 50Km of towing a 1.5 tonne trailer.

The mileage shows a reduction of approximately 20 - 30 Km per tank (tank usually does 500Km, did 480 Km). This may have been measurement error. More on mileage later if we ever decide to spend the money using straight diesel again.

• Motor Vehicle Trial of FWVO in Motor Car -- 66% FWVO
  
  
  • 66% FWVO on same Totota Hilux
  • Temperate winter conditions -- slightly above zero degrees Celsius

Performance across the board is not reduced, however cold morning starting is taking observably more cranking, but not excessive. Total FWVO KM now exceeds 1000Km & 160 litres filtered, with no mechanical failure.