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Tiny Biodiesel Reactors
Lee_in_KC writes "A professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University
developed a small reactor to directly convert vegetable oil to biodiesel.
Goran Jovanovic reports his invention is approximately the size of a credit
card. It pumps vegetable oil and alcohol through parallel channels to
convert the oil into biodiesel almost instantly. Current mainstream
methods to produce biodiesel take more than a day and also produces other byproducts which must be neutralized before disposal or use in other manufacturing processes."
Mr. Fusion.
I'm not sure how feasible this is. Also, as per the longer article (above), it does not eliminate the need for NaOH; unless I'm reading it wrong.
Aren't we fat enough without our cars putting on extra pounds as well?!?! Vegetable oil has like 20 grams of fat per serving.. I wonder how many miles-per-gallon my Hummer will get after its intake is clogged with cholesterol..
> Conventional production involves dissolving a catalyst, such as sodium hydroxide, in alcohol, then stirring it into vegetable oil in large vats for about two hours. The mixture then has to sit for 12 to 24 hours while a slow chemical reaction forms biodiesel along with glycerin, a byproduct.
It mentions a byproduct in the conventional method. Am I missing something, or does it not clarify whether or not this new method produces a byproduct?
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
I'd applaude but the sodium methoxide disolved the flesh of my hands.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'll be interested to see how much the oil companies pay for his patent so they can bury it for the next fifty years.
I find it interesting that the biodiesel reactor is - literally - the size of a credit card.
... Priceless!
Biodiesel car upgrade $50
New fuel lines $80
Energy independence
For a free fuel life, there's GTA
For everything else, there's BiodieselCard.
Will in Seattle
Given that the pipes are smaller than a human hair, it's funny that the article says nothing about how many devices would you need to pump out commercially viable quantities.
From the article:
The device - about the size of a credit card - pumps vegetable oil and alcohol through tiny parallel channels, each smaller than a human hair, to convert the oil into biodiesel almost instantly...The device is small, but it can be stacked in banks to increase production levels to the volume required for commercial use.
I mean, my car already runs on a credit-card-sized device. It's called a credit card.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Essentially, the reactors, which can range in size from less than a square inch to several square inches, use tiny, parallel channels no larger in diameter than a human hair, to bring the alcohol and vegetable oil into contact with each other in the presence of a sodium hydroxide catalyst.
What results is not only a tiny stream of 100 percent biodiesel fuel, but also glycerin, the latter having uses in making soaps and even fossil fuel-free plastics.
The microreactors, each of which produces only a minute amount of biodiesel, are designed to be used with thousands of others of the same size in a single, integrated system."
Sounds like the mechanical equivalent of an organ.
"a unit about the size of a computer printer and costing $1,000 to $5,000 could produce as much as 50,000 to 100,000 gallons of biodiesel a year."
...REPLACE CYAN BIO DIESEL CARTRIDGE...
"Jovanovic compared it to Hewlett-Packard when that company invented the inkjet printer cartridge."
Looks at printer sized bio diesel generator:
This guy must really like printers.
It's more concentrated in terms of caloric value (energy).
Plus, PETA's reaction would be hysterical.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
From TFA:
"If we're successful with this, nobody will ever make biodiesel any other way,"
So, what you are trying to say is that you haven't ever done it, but in *theory* it should be a phenomenal improvement over exiting methods of biodeisel production...
I'll be over here holding my breath.
The energy returned on energy invested for biofuel is about 1/10th what it is for petroleum
According to scientific papers searchable in ScienceDirect (if you have university access), the Netherlands is acheiving around 40 percent energy - and since it's derived from solar radiation (sun on plants), this is a lot more efficient than our current 30 percent usage of Canadian Tar Oil Sands, which uses barrels of oil to release more oil from the sands.
So, from that perspective, it's more efficient.
Now, it's true that the energy density is not as high, so long-distance movement of such fuels is not as useful as local power plant usage, or local heating. That's a function of caloric mass content and BTU/m2 - but we're only beginning to develop this source, so one can easily expect higher yields as we manipulate the plant genomes and conversion processes.
Will in Seattle
If thousands of cancers a year are being blamed on ultraviolet, well, there's a lot more ultraviolet streaming down from the Sun then you could theoretically come up with as coming out of your car engine. Now, secondhand smoke is another matter, and I suspect a highly overrated cancer threat, but that's another story. Don't hold your breath for an "amazing blessing".
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Looks at printer sized bio diesel generator: ...REPLACE CYAN BIO DIESEL CARTRIDGE...
This guy must really like printers.
Actually, many scientific labs at state universities use printers and printer heads a lot - for example, a new sealed plastic crystal suspension device created at the University of Washington uses HP inkjets (cheap to get, and colored Husky Purple) to deliver reagants in controlled amounts into plastic tubes which are then sealed by laser.
Every university has a section that recycles computers and printers - so it's easy to divert some of them for use in development of new technologies.
Thus, using printer technology to create a biodiesel converter is not that unusual.
Will in Seattle
...is whether it can run in reverse: pump in biodiesel and veggie oil, and get pure alcohol out the other end. Then we'll really have something! :}
There is a 100 mpg carburetor patent that an oil company is sitting on.
This story has been floating around since the 1950s, far longer than any patent term. Either EvilOilCo has a hundred-year patent to go with their hundren-mile-per-gallon car, or there never was such a device...
0 1 - just my two bits
Japanese researchers announced several months ago that they've eliminated the need for expensive acids in biodiesel reactors.
--
make install -not war
Basically the concept is on paper only. Why else would he be stating things like "If it works...", or "...could reduce...", "...might not need a catalyst..." etc.? It is because they havn't gotten a working prototype yet. They basically believe that their design could work, as they have done the chemical reaction analysis as well as a design analysis on how to cause the chemical reaction to occur quickly and efficently. But again, this is all on paper still. We don't even know yet if their results from the chemical reaction simulation are correct yet!
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Or how much the university demands in licensing fees.
Far too much good technology goes unused for years until patents expire because their creators overestimate how much they're worth (or simply get greedy.)
Dolby had it right. He licensed Dolby technology at a price so cheap (a few cents per tape player) that manufacturers were happy to pay it. So- every tape player ended up with Dolby licensed technology, and he made millions.
Please help metamoderate.
Combine these reactors with these http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 1/1718256 algae who eat CO2 and can be pressed for a vegetable oil, and your coil burning power plant is now more eco friendly. You can also just grow large amounts of other algae and use them to produce the veggie oil also.
For those of you who were born stupid, the emission of radiation by spark gaps was first discovered by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz - the same one that the Hertz in megahertz is named after - back in 1887. It was Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen who discovered that this phenomenon could be used to produce X-rays in 1895 Here is a paper on building an Xray tube USING SPARK PLUGS. http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=RSINAK000072000010003983000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
Here are several scientific papers on the production of X-rays by spark gaps in various gaseous media.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/icfa/fall97/pape r2/paper2.pdf
http://www.webcom.com/sknkwrks/xray.htm
http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com/_PatentLibrary /_FischerXRaySparkGap/index.htm
Morons.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Didn't your Econ 101 prof erase this myth for you long ago? Simply put, if big oil or anyone else has a useful patent, they could make more money by using it than hiding it.
IF Big Oil is greedy, and IF Big Oil owns a useful patent, they Will use it.
No, simpleton, diesels do in fact not use spark plugs. They use a much higher compression ratio to cause the compressed fuel and air to reach a temperature where the fuel ignites spontaneously. They are assisted by *glow* plugs - which are wires heated by electrical resistance that use no spark whatsoever.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
It's not about whether it creates CO2 when burned or not. It's about where the coal for it comes. In vegetable oil, it comes from the plants, which get it from air, from - yes, CO2.
And that CO2 would be released after the plant dies anyway, because of all microbic activity etc. So why not to use the released energy tp move a car instead of as food for microbes. So it's kind of recycling the CO2.
But when you burn fossile oils, then you are creating CO2 from coal that would have staid under ground for a looooong time, so in that case you woud release CO2 into air without getting any CO2 away.
So there IS a difference. A very significant one.
they would immediately jump into the car business and make far more money that way than they could selling oil. Variations of this are demonstrated in every basic economics book. Quit spewing this ludicrious, repeatedly-refuted myth.
For example, let us assume this is the status quo:
1: Big Oil owns a patent for a 100 mpg car that can be produced at the same cost with the same features as a regular car
2: A "regular" car costs $20,000, gets 25 mpg, and is driven 100,000 miles (4000 gallons, lifetime) at $3/gallon
3: Big Oil has a 10% profit margin on gasoline, and Detroit/Japan have a 10% margin on regular cars
Now, here is the first question. How much would YOU, the average consumer, be willing to pay for a new BigOil brand car? Well, the total cost of car + gas of a regular car is $32000. So as long as a BigOil car costs less in total, you would buy it. Since it will have a gasoline cost of $3000, it stands to reason that you will choose a Big Oil car for any price up to $29000.
Now, where does Big Oil make more profits? The status quo or by selling BigOil cars? Well, in the status quo, they sell you $12000 worth of gas and keep $1200 after costs. Not bad! But what if they instead sell you a BigOil car? Well, the cost of producing a BigOil or regular car is $18,000. Yet they can sell it to you for $29000, an $11000 profit. They can then snatch $300 more on profits from the remaining gas they sell you, for a total of $11,300.
Now assuming Big Oil is greedy (a safe assumption), which do you think they would rather have? $1200 or $11300?
Myth refuted. Please move along.
ah, I see. So with unrefined rapeseed oil, we can skip the step of moving to a hydrogen based economy, and move directly to a "rape" based economy. Where "rape" is the fancy new term for "unrefined rapeseed oil". I'm sure that "rape" will make all of our lives much better.
Nope. In order to generate X-rays you need to accelerate the electrons to >30kev before they hit the target. This requires a vacuum between the cathode and the anode target.
In a gas the electrons will never reach more than a few tens ev. As they accelerate they strike another atom and their energy goes in ionizing the gas.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Don't they teach kids ANY organic chemistry nowadays? How are we to produce the next generation of recreational drug designers and home-made explosives producers that made the West what it is today?
Pining for the fjords
However, it's clearly a demonstration of the problems of the patent system that someone as ignorant of basic physics and chemistry as this can get a patent.
Yes, I am in a bad mood today. Totally ignorant postings and moderations on science and technology always have that effect on me.
Pining for the fjords
"There is a 100 mpg carburetor patent that an oil company is sitting on."
s p
Prove it.
This story has been around forever and seems to have no merit to it. Snopes addesses it as false:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/business/carburetor.a
So unless you can show me some proof to the contrary, I'm going to to say it's just so much BS.
There's been con artists that have claimed to have miracle devices. However there's always some common threads:
1) They do something that seems to be impossible.
2) They'll never let anyone mess with and test their devices.
3) There's always some string of "unfortunate problems" that keep it form coming to market.
Also please remember: Patents last only 20 years, and by definition they are public. So if an oil company bought a patent for a super efficent car, they could sit on it for only 20 years, and everyone who wanted to know how it worked would, since the patent is public record. It's not like they could cover it up.
So, please, provide a link to the 100mpg patent if you think it's real.
http://befreetech.com/suppressed_inventions.htm has more listings, including Canadian patents (Charles N. Pogue was Canadian).
Pogue seems to have been bought out by the oil companies, and he did well for himself. Other inventors and tweakers have seen their offices/labs trashed and I have heard of disappearances and foul-play. Of course, you cannot believe everything you read, but considering what is at stake for the major movers-and-shakers, I wouldn't put it past them to do whatever it takes to keep what they have.
There are still some unresolved technical concerns with the use of biodiesel at concentration greater than 5%. Some of the concerns are:
_ vehicles/BiodieselTechnology.asp
Requires special care at low temperatures to avoid excessive rise in viscosity and loss of fluidity
Storage is a problem due to higher then normal risk of microbial contamination due to water absorption as well as a higher rate of oxidation stability which creates insoluble gums and sediment deposits
Being hygroscopic, the fuel tends to have increased water content, which increases the risk of corrosion
Biodiesel tends to cause higher engine deposit formations
The methyl esters in biodiesel fuel may attack the seals and composite materials used in vehicle fuel systems
It may attack certain metals such as zinc, copper based alloys, cast iron, tin, lead, cobalt, and manganese
It is an effective solvent, and can act as a paint stripper, whilst it will tend to loosen deposits in the bottom of fuel tanks of vehicles previously run on mineral diesel
https://www.fleet.ford.com/showroom/environmental
A lot of these problems can be solved using Teflon, Inconel, ceramic, and stainless for the fuel systems. You can also coat the interior passages of new engines to prevent a lot of that corrosion.
High water content in biodiesel will, unfortunately, be a problem for the forseeable future. What it means, though, is that there will probably be the need for some kind of additive - viscosity index improvers, antifungals, and whatnot that are already added to regular diesel.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
You are half correct. The intended process is transesterification, which is direct (stepwise) substitution of the glycerol in fat with three molecules of alcohol (say for example ethanol). So one large triglyceride (a molecule of fat) is broken down to 3 fatty acid ethyl esters and one molecule of glycerin. This process is catalytic, and can be catalyzed by acid or base.
(BTW, oil = liquid fat).
The problematic side reaction is hydrolysis of the oil to fatty acids (i.e. saponification to soap), due to the presence of water in the crude oil. This side reaction is compounded by the difficulty of mixing the fat and alcohol during reaction (fat and alcohol not completely miscible), which reduces the efficiency of the catalytic transesterification, thereby increasing the extent of the unwanted side reaction (saponification to soap). Also crude oils contain fatty acids which could quickly neutralize a catalytic amount of sodium hydroxide (stopping the process).
Therefore the conventional (batchwise) process is to treat the fat with excess sodium hydroxide in a non-catalytic initial step; whatever water is present is consumed in a conventional, non-catalytic saponification to sodium salts of fatty acids, glycerin, and excess sodium hydroxide. Any fatty acid is converted to its sodium salt. All of which are easily removed from the fat (oil). The resulting purified fat is suitable for the catalytic transesterification process to biodiesel.
I'm a chemist, but haven't worked with these microreactors, so the following is guessing:
A microprocessor can increase the efficiency of the desired transesterification by allowing intimate mixing of the alcohol and the fat, which is half the battle in this case. Also, a continuous processor can have advantages over batch processing in that the reaction conditions (pH, temp, etc.) can be dynamically controlled.
My guess is that the fat (oil) would still require pre-treatment to remove water, fatty acids, and fine particles before entering the fuel cell.
Be heard || Be herd
I also think that oil companies will most probably just buy this patent (offer him an offer he cant refuse :). Big companies just care about profit.
But look at it the othwer way - what if this invention would be success and not bought by some oil company - imagine how many jobs will be lost by declining profits of oil companies.Thousands of jobs will be cut, entire economies slidding etc. The oil business is such a big machine that if it falls then it will be probalby bigger disaster than them "buying out" the inventor. Sad but true.
The devices do exist, but often aren't practical for everyday use. Many years ago, my dad built a vapor carburetor (basically an industrial strength fuel preheater) and installed it on his 1979 GMC Suburban, with the plumbing necessary to be able to switch it in and out of the fuel system. When in use and working well, the truck got around 40-45 mpg (I've seen it myself), but it was totally useless for anything except extended highway driving as it didn't deal with varying fuel demand very well and also took a bit of time to heat up enough to work. He eventually removed it as it mostly got in the way whenever he needed to do anything under the hood.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
First, biodiesel (diesel in general) is more efficient than current gasoline engines. It would behoove the world to have diesel engines.
Second doesn't need to be repeated as other posts have explained it.
Third, do you realize how many tens of thousands of pounds (maybe hundreds of thousands???) of food the US government buys from farmers and destroys each year to control food prices? The issue of the starving world isn't food. It's getting them the food. And much blood has been spilled trying to do it (remember Somalia?).
Reliance on bio-diesel would possibly be one of the best possible outcomes in the oil war we could have. Almost anyone can produce vegtables. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years to produce. There are only a few places with fossil fuels. If there were a reliance upon biodiesel, we'd see entire farms just for the purpose of producing biodiesel vegtables. The wealth would be back in the hands of farmers rather than oil tycoons. If for nothing else, no more blood would be spilled over oil.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
There is a magic solution, it's called hemp. Hemp transforms solar energy into biomass more efficiently than just about any other plant, and can be processed into fibre, oil and feedstock. Hemp also grows about anywhere. If the US and Canada planted just the excess farmland and some of the land that can't currently be farmed with hemp, we could solve our energy problems.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
http://blog.myspace.com/ex_misltech
Nothing compares to the output from Algae as far as bio oil goes .
* Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
* Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
* Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
* Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
* Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
* Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
First, the amount of energy needed will stay the same, whether you run your truck on gasoline, diesel, alcohol, natural gas, wood, coal, electricity, hydrogen or gooseshit.
Well, yes, but biodiesel's energy comes from the Sun, via photosynthesis. And while solar will eventually run out, when it does the Earth will be uninhabitable anyway.
Second, the result of combustion will always be CO2 (except for Hydrogen and electricity), so forget about cancelling global warming.
Except, of course, all the CO2 put out by burning by biodisel is CO2 that the plants took out of the air in the first place, so there's no increase in atmospheric CO2.
Third, where are you going to grow all the plants needed to make all that vegetable oil and alcohol???
Ah, now you've struck a useful note. Even if all the Earth's arable land surface were farmed at American productivity levels with maximum-production oil crops, we still couldn't displace ordinary diesel use.
However, there is an alternative; oily algae. While the infrastructure to start producing it in necessary qantities would be expensive, it has high-enough oil output per acre to be a practical alternative. And the land for it can be vast tracts of desert, the pools filled with seawater.
Where are you going to take the energy needed to transform all those plants into biodiesel?
The energy content of biodiesel exceeds the energy necessary to process high-oil algae; the primary energy source for the creation of the long oil chains is the plant's photosynthesis. The result is that biodiesel-powered generators could be used to generate the power for the pressing and conversion process.
How many people will starve so the americans can still move their arses in their plush trucks???
None, just like today. Some will continue to starve because of deliberately chosen policies of thier national governments, like every recorded famine of the last thirty years. But changing that is a matter of willingness to violently violate the soverignty of the famine-causing governments, not economics or resource distribution.
There is no miracle solution,
Right, just solutions that require difficult and expensive -- but achievable -- engineering.
ASTM already has standards for a 20% blend.
Go to Biodiesel.org's Fact sheets and have look for yourself. If you were to use 100% biodiesel, some of your quoted concerns would need to be addressed. Not that big a deal- just need to replace pure rubber for fuel lines, check and replace fuel filters for diesels that have already been in service, and preheat/keep warm any diesel driven vehicles if it gets really cold outside.
What's really spiffy is the possibility that small kits of these could be used right on the farm to make more self-sufficient farming possible for remote areas of the world. A tractor might run for 20 years, but bringing in diesel is a yearly event.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Explosives are merely combustables with their own in-built oxidizer so that they effectively have an unlimited
:->
source of oxidization (which could be any reactants, really, so long as it's a combustion type reaction...).
1) You can make your own liquid oxygen- all you need is to machine the right gear and it doesn't red-flag as the resources to make the liquification machine are needed to make tools, cars, etc.
2) Anything combustable that is LOX saturated will explode if ignited- it effectively has an unlimited amount of oxidizer at it's disposal to combust with.
3) A carcoal briquette, such as out of a Kingsford bag will explode with about the force of a stick of dynamite if thoroughly soaked with LOX and ignited or hit with a primary detonator like a blasting squib. This is the basis of a lot of commercial mining explosives these days. Don't want to do a blast? Let the LOX out and it's no longer explosive.
This is just ONE piece of chemistry that, you too, can play with without much notice. There's raftloads others.
And before you get on to me about "revealing" this to the terrorists- it's common knowlege and they also know how
to make comparable substances that don't need cryo containment to go with it. Contrary to popular belief to the
otherwise, the leaders , while quite nuts themselves, aren't stupid. Many of them are very well
educated- by the US educational system, even.
(By the way, black powder rocketry's fun, but Zinc/Sulphur mix rocketry's even moreso and easier to get
the stuff...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Nice karma whoring. That's from your blog eh? I personally collated those statistics and added them to the Wikipedia biodiesel article with this diff. They were subsequently improved with additional unit conversions and I and maybe others added some additional ones later. And your units aren't even right, what's an m/km?. If you're going to take GFDL material, which I do agree you can use freely as long as you follow the license, at least get the fixes too.
My god, I was hoping you had made some of those errors copying it over, but there they are right on Ford's website. Sounds like Ford is just trying once again to explain why they are not helping to develop cleaner technology, but still want to say they are. ... - Yes that's true biodiesel gels at higher temperatures ... - There's not really any evidence of this as it contradicts the last point of biodiesel being a good solvent/detergent. It cleans engine parts. If there is evidence of this, I haven't seen it, and Ford certainly doesn't present any. ... - People have already pointed out that everyone else just switched to seals and hoses that are more resistant to this type of thing. Marginal cost difference.
*Requires special
*Storage is a problem due to higher then normal risk of microbial contamination due to water absorption as well as a higher rate of oxidation stability which creates insoluble gums and sediment deposits - Did they really just say higher rate of oxidative stability?? Biodiesel is more biodegradable, thus more degradable and doesn't store for as long. There's tradeoffs--less toxic if you spill it means it doesn't store as well.
*Biodiesel tends to cause
*The methyl esters
*It is an effective solvent... - This is true, but the end of it is stupid sticking they're head in the sand. All you do it check your fuel filters more for a little while and once the crud is cleaned out you're better off.
Engine's just need to be designed for biodiesel and this won't happen until the market matures more and there are greater economic incentives to do so.