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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
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
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
"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.
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
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
According to the US Economic Census, the Oil industry employs about 95,000 people inside the US. The US has lost 2.6 Million manufacturing jobs since 2001.
Gas stations, etc., would still need to exist -- they would just sell a different fuel.
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"
Thank you! Finally, someone who realizes that the only way to get a 100 mpg vehicle is to build one that does not move very fast, cannot go up a hill, and is also otherwise not very useful. For instance, if you have a 100% efficient gasoline engine, and it's running gasoline with 114,300 kJ/gal energy content, and you have a nice low drag coefficient (Cd*A = (.3 x 2 m2) = .6 m2), you could get 121 mpg at 40 miles per hour on a flat road with no wind and no rolling resistance. Now, if you've got a good engine (30% efficient), you'll get 40 mpg with the same engine. Wow, look. That's what we've got today. Now, if you only want to go 25 mph, you can get 100 mpg...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
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.