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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."
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..
I'd applaude but the sodium methoxide disolved the flesh of my hands.
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.
Glycerin is not a problem in and of itself, it's the catalyst properties that are mixed in from the NaOH that end up creating useless glycerin that must be purified to be of use. Since this may eliminate the need for the catalyst, the glycerin can be used immediately without purification.
"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.
...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.
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make install -not war
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.
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.
Umm ok except that works for 20 years tops. That's how long a patent lasts, they aren't perpetual. Also you can't hide a patent, they are public record.
Basically, in the US you have two ways of protecting an innovative process: a patent or a trade secret.
A trade secret is just what it sounds like, a secret. You develop something and don't tell anyone. So let's say I invent a way to turn lead in to gold at my company. I decide to keep it a secret. I release the plans to nobody and make all my employees sign an NDA. Thus I'm the only one who can do it. Fair enough, but there's no special legal protection. If a rival happens to discover how I do it, they are free to use it, it's not a secret anymore.
So the other route I can take is a patent. Here I publish my method for lead to gold for the world to see in the form of a patent. However, in doing so, I recieve a legal gaurentee that it's mine. You can read all about it, but you can't use it without my permission. I'm free to set the terms on that. But I only have 20 years to do that in. After 20 years, it's assumed I should have made my money, and it's now free for the world.
Now, while I can decide to patent a trade secret, I can't take something I've patented and make it a secret. Trade secrets are things you have to enforce actively. They don't have any special legal standing, they are just a defacto sort of thing. The government recognises your right to keep a secret if you want, but offers it no special protection. One it's no longer a secret, too bad for you, should have gotten a patent before hand.
So if the oil companies bought a patent to sit on it, they are just buying themselves 20 years. Ok maybe that's the point, but you can't keep claiming that they are "sitting on a patent" that they allegedly got 50 years ago, because it's been public domain for 30 years already.
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
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.
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.