Alcohols are better lubricants than water, though we don't usually think of them as "lubricants". It's a relative term. They're arguably less damaging than the water they absorb from fuel, and disperse the water into solution in the fuel, at least until the alcohol evaporates and the water recondenses.

This is were this thread gets interesting... where we cross thread it to the Biodieselers. If you really wanna get into this do a search of cloud point. For example look at this thread.

You will notice DaveUK talking about cloud point... (in a thread dedicated to addatives) the temperature at which water comes out of solution from diesel, Bio and Dino, to form microdroplets!

But how does water get into fuel that was at one stage waterless? While it is true that as solvents go water is at one end of the spectrum, being the iconic polar solvent and oil at the other being the iconic non-polar solvent; due to the "special nature" of water and hydrogen bonding/dipolar moments and some other associated wizardry wherever you find hydrogen and oxygen bonded there is scope for water to associate and dissolve.

It is a known fact in the biodiesel world that well aired BioD will pick up moisture which will be, at higher temperatures, safely dissolved, probably moreso than Dino due to the ester bond. Lowering the temp reduces the energy available for dissolving water and it comes out of solution and becomes visable as cloudy fuel/oil.

A contributing factor as to why unfiltered oil holds more water, there is more hydrogen and oxygen in non oil form in the particulates to associate with.

Driving all the dissolved water out of oil is only temperary and dry oil will absorb water. The amount depends on the temperature and the humidity of the air. Fuel and oil will continually exchange water and gases witht he atmosphere if esposed to it.

Its said in many places not to use cloudy fuel cloudy oil. But as far as diesel goes cloudy fuel is not as bad as gel point. Addatives are used to lower the gel and cloud points of both diesel and BioDiesel but the 2 problems require different treatments.

Lowering gel point is best achieved by kerosine or other commercial petroleum addative or even used crankcase oil... see dualfuels comprehensive thread on this..

Lowering cloud point involves increasing the soluability of water in fuel/oil. I have done no tests but I predict that the addition of ethanol will lower the cloud point of diesel and oil. there are addatives availabe to lower cloud points in diesel and would probably work in oil.

So basically if cavitation is caused by dissolved water it happens all the time in every engine. So I definitely support Johnno in it being an urban myth at least as far as clear, none cloudy fuel goes.

But Dana is right to sound a water warning... As I said before, just 1 normal drop of free water past the final filter and you can kiss your IP goodbye and your friendly diesel mechanic hello...

I understand people get away with cloudy fuel and it gets used but then you are between Dana's cavitation senario and Johnno's urban myth..... A little heat into the fuel and it clears which is probably wot happens at the IP.

As I said a search of the Biodiesel forum on cloud point will give insights.

quote:

You will notice DaveUK talking about cloud point... (in a thread dedicated to addatives) the temperature at which water comes out of solution from diesel, Bio and Dino, to form microdroplets!

I make both B100 and use wvo fuel (mostly the latter) and must disagree. CP does not refer to the point at which water comes out of solution. It refers to the point at which some component in the mix solidifies in the fuel. In different fuels this is a diferent component

In petrodiesel it is usually parrafins.

In Biodiesel it is usually very long chain esters or in some cases unreacted wvo or possibly glycerols, partially reacted wvo, or plant waxes.

In wvo it can be plant waxes, fats, tallows, or high melting point oils in the mix.

But I don't think it is ever water.

Water can make both wvo and biodiesel cloudy..but it is usually at a temperature far higher than the CP.

quote:

So basically if cavitation is caused by dissolved water it happens all the time in every engine.

I do not believe that DISSOLVED water causes cavitation. It might...I don't have much information on it. I DO believe that SUSPENDED water can cause cavitation. Suspended water is larger than dissolved water..and smaller than free water.

Not trying to be combative..just clarifying and adding what I believe to be true based on my research.

As I said; interesting. Could it be that anything coming out of solution, be it solids (parafins) or liquid water gives cloudy fuel and that a report of cloudy fuel could be one or the other or both?

I need to do a big search here and get back to you Dana, keep up the good work mate.

Cloud point of course may be of less concern to grease users as you heat the oil therefore re-dissovling the cloud particles with any luck and of course, depending on what they are; Parafins not so good but microdrops of parrafin are not damaging, as far as I know, to the IP or injectors, if they fit thru the filter they fit thru the rest of the system... Otherwise they block the filter and the vehicle stops.

Cloud point is the technical term for solids coming out of solution, not water. For water many people call it haze. Sticking to these words helps discussion.

quote:

Originally posted by danalinscott:


Water can make both wvo and biodiesel cloudy..but it is usually at a temperature far higher than the CP.

I wish we had better language to describe the difference. I think of the point at which water causes biodiesel to go cloudy (a higher temp than cloud point) as 'water haze point' just to come up with SOME sort of terminology to make these things less confusing when talking to newbies for instance. It's easy to confuse the two, but they're quite different and quite far apart on the temperature scale (ie something like 80-90F, variable depending on amount of water droplets, for water haze, and 28-40F for cloud point depending on the biodiesel's feedstock.

Mark

It's well known that free water causes problems in fuel. From what I have read there are 2 schools of thought on how to deal with water in fuel. 1) run a filter/seperator (old school)
2)Disperse it into solution and burn it.
3)Make a micro-emulsion

It seems kinda funny to me that water in fuel (WVO in this case) is freaking some people out. Gunnerman decided to make a diesel fuel with water. Now that a few of the big boys have stole his idea and are marketing it. I have not read about IP failure with these water based fuels??

Emulsification is different than free water.

Mark

Yes I'm aware of that, your point is.....?

My point is; why sweat the unseen. Yeah go ahead and take the water you see out. Why not use a dispersant or emulsifier to treat the rest. I personally don't intentially heat treat
to settle water. Now in warm weather the drums I collect from are black and have a southernly exposeure with lots of insolation (not to be confused with insulation But this fall and early winter i just treated with a dispersant.

Also, once you have heat settled water out. What keeps water from condensating back in once it's in your tank??? Seems to me cavatation lurks behind every corner no matter how careful you may be

quote:

Originally posted by girl mark:
Emulsification is different than free water.

Mark

quote:

Originally posted by Sushi Blender:
Yes I'm aware of that, your point is.....?

quote:

Originally posted by girl mark:
Emulsification is different than free water.

Mark

Um, 10 IP failures in about one year in the early days of SVO use in my town?

For more details see page 4 of the 'don't buy a greasel kit' thread.

Mark

One gets the feeling Mark that newbies are sometimes a little beneath you... but perhaps I'm a little stung at getting the cloud point thing wrong and I guess, given all the different posters here there is room for confusion.

Neutral thank you, as always, for the correction.

And, err, uh, I'll assume those failures were NOT using any dispersants or emulsifying agents???
I'm blending, so the Dino products "may" work to my advantage. Dino stuff having a greater hydrophilic action than WVO. I think you're missing my point?


Mark[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]


Um, 10 IP failures in about one year in the early days of SVO use in my town?

For more details see page 4 of the 'don't buy a greasel kit' thread.

Mark[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

Time for a commerical break here, and lets define a few of these terms here. Too many years since chemistry, so I'm a little lost here.

Need to find defintion in laymans terms of:
dispersants and emulsifying agents

I take it one of these "blends" water safely into suspension, and the other makes it "fall out" of the mixture?

BP,

quote:

One gets the feeling Mark that newbies are sometimes a little beneath you...

I don't get that feeling at all. But maybe I come acccross that way too and don't notice.
Remember,GMark like myself deals with hundreds and hundreds of newbies each year on a personal and pretty much constant basis. More than one has accused ME of being "short" with them (which is possible) when I was just trying to answer as much of the questions (which may not be very clear sometimes) they asked in as few words as possible. And there are folks that don't know how to do a search (who I do not become perturbed with) and those that obviously do..and ask me anyway (who I do become a bit testy with sometimes).

And I don't even have to deal with the "your a girls..you don't know anything" crap that I am sure she runs into.

Sushi,

quote:

It's well known that free water causes problems in fuel. From what I have read there are 2 schools of thought on how to deal with water in fuel. 1) run a filter/seperator (old school)
2)Disperse it into solution and burn it.
3)Make a micro-emulsion

It seems kinda funny to me that water in fuel (WVO in this case) is freaking some people out.

Water ruins IPs. In diesel fuel the manufacturers go to great lengths to prevent water from ever reaching an IP. Experienced diesel owners make certain they do to.

I discovered that water commonly exists as suspended water in wvo but not so in diesel. It tends to exist as either dissolved water (in very small amounts) and free water.

Apparrently dissolved water does not cause large amounts of damage to an IP..or possibly nothing can really be done to combat dissolved water in diesel fule. I have been researching but have not found anything deffinitive yet.

Free water can toast an IP in seconds if enough is present. And even small amounts can damage injectors and IPs dramatically reducing the efficiency and lifespan of each.

Suspended water is much closer to free water than dissolved water. So it can definately cause IP and Injector damage. Not as dramatic as free water damage but expensive damage none the less.

I do not advocate "freaking out" about suspended water. Nor can I support a policy of "why sweat the unseen". And frankly I am surprised you do.

I advocate making wvo users aware of the possability of damage and how to avoid it. It is only a problem if it is ignored.

As to:

quote:

I have not read about IP failure with these water based fuels

There could be several explanations for that. Among which might be:
1.These fuels are experimental and not widely used.
2.Some propietary process/additive to avoid cavitation may be the basis of the fuel production.
3.There might be a contractual provision among the users of the experimental fuel preventing such reporting.
4.Folks that run their diesels on water based fuels might simply accept the likelyhood of IP damage and find in not worth reporting when it happens.

Personally just because my vision is incapable of allowing me to "see" something unaided by magnification I do not accept that it signals "all is safe". You can't see E.coli either...but would you freak out if I knowingly let you drink water with a high concentration of it? Or encouraged you to?

quote:

Need to find defintion in laymans terms of dispersants and emulsifying agents. I take it one of these "blends" water safely into suspension, and the other makes it "fall out" of the mixture

knkreb,

I believe that dispersants are supposed to disperse or "break up" microdroplets of water (what I have been referring to as "suspended water") into smaller and smaller microdroplets. The aim would be to make them so small they could not cause appreciable damage if they created cavitation as they pass through the IP and injectors...or possible make them incapable of creating cavitation entirely.

emulsifying agents on the other hand are designed to allow or encourage free water to become more easily suspended ...and remain in suspension longer.

For our purposes we do not want more free water in suspension..but we MAY want suspended water to be more dispersed.

Optimumly I think we want an additive that encourages suspended water to drop out of suspension quicklyso it can be more easily removed. Possibly by conventional diesel "water separators".

Water ruins IPs. In diesel fuel the manufacturers go to great lengths to prevent water from ever reaching an IP. Experienced diesel owners make certain they do to.

And how do they (manufacturers and owners) go about it? I'll assume you mean be adding additives.



I discovered that water commonly exists as suspended water in wvo but not so in diesel.

Can you point me to some information that states vegetable oil is more hydrophilic than dino diesel or bio-Diesel?


Suspended water is much closer to free water than dissolved water. So it can definately cause IP and Injector damage. Not as dramatic as free water damage but expensive damage none the less.

So the ideal would be a way to surround the water with oil. Therefore not allowing the water to come in contact with metal parts.

I do not advocate "freaking out" about suspended water. Nor can I support a policy of "why sweat the unseen". And frankly I am surprised you do.


As blender and not a striaght WVO guy. I realize no matter how careful I am condensation happens. I live in a very humid climate also. The technology exists in over the counter additives.That allows me to be somewhat unconcerned


I advocate making wvo users aware of the possability of damage and how to avoid it. It is only a problem if it is ignored.

How do you adviod condensation in your WVO tank? Especially with all the thermocycling that occurs?


1.These fuels are experimental and not widely used.
2.Some propietary process/additive to avoid cavitation may be the basis of the fuel production.
3.There might be a contractual provision among the users of the experimental fuel preventing such reporting.
4.Folks that run their diesels on water based fuels might simply accept the likelyhood of IP damage and find in not worth reporting when it happens.

I let your speculation go with out much comment. Only to say that these fuels are being sold by the big boys. I'm sure they are being held responsible for any damage that is occuring. To assume they are abosorbing the cost of rebuilds in their customers motors and continue to supply the product could onlt point to a huge profit margin, to absorb such part failure. Doesn't seem likely to me

Personally just because my vision is incapable of allowing me to "see" something unaided by magnification I do not accept that it signals "all is safe". You can't see E.coli either...but would you freak out if I knowingly let you drink water with a high concentration of it? Or encouraged you to? [/QUOTE]

so I guess you feel safe knowing you have heat settled and filterd your WVO? It now becomes impervious to water accumulation in the tank?

Water contamination can exist in diesel fuel in three forms:

1) Emulsified water, where the water is suspended in the fuel like oil and vinegar in salad dressing. This definition does not include
commercial emulsified fuels.

2) Free water, where the water is separated from the fuel and usually is found on the bottom of fuel/storage tanks.

3) Dissolved water, where the water has been chemically dissolved in the fuel, like sugar in coffee. The warmer the fuel, the more water will be dissolved, but as temperatures drop, the water will come out of the solution in the form of free water. This is where dispersants come in. Although I question the notion of water falling out with colder temps with the newer additives out there.

quote:

Originally posted by knkreb:
Time for a commerical break here, and lets define a few of these terms here. Too many years since chemistry, so I'm a little lost here.

Need to find defintion in laymans terms of:
dispersants and emulsifying agents

I take it one of these "blends" water safely into suspension, and the other makes it "fall out" of the mixture?

quote:

Originally posted by Thebushpig:
One gets the feeling Mark that newbies are sometimes a little beneath you... but perhaps I'm a little stung at getting the cloud point thing wrong and I guess, given all the different posters here there is room for confusion.

Neutral thank you, as always, for the correction.

The main reason I use the word 'newbies' quite often , is because in my position as a biofuels educator, I see hundreds of new-to-biofuels people all arrive at the same exact conclusions when working from incomplete information- sometimes these are common misconceptions or other mistakes. some of these conclusions are logical-sounding and that's why so many peopel arrive at them (not to mention the mistakes newbies make because they're commonly given bad info on the internet such as some of the stuff spawned by Tickell's book for example). I think ti's important to point these mistakes out, because it's so likely that many folks are thinking the same exact thing as each other.

For instance, 'diesel-water emulsions aren't damaging so water in vegoil must not be' is a sort of logic, if you don't know about the difference between emulsion and other forms of water.

likewise, it's extremely common to find people get confused about the two forms of cloudiness, 'cloud point' and 'water haze'.

I point these common fallacies/conclusions out in the context of 'newbies', because it's quite likely that more than one newcomer person on this forum may arrive at the same conclusion. Perhaps I should just use the word 'people'?


Mark

The attached picture shows 4 well settled bottles of my wvo: 1) as-received from the restauraunt, 2) dried (heated to 250F in a shallow skillet with lots of surface area to evaporate), 3) dried and rough filtered while hot (100F) through a commercial restauraunt grease filter, and 4) dried, rough filtered and final filtered (warm) through a string-wound house water filter rated at 5-microns. Note that I don't have a sample of my "cold filtered" oil, but I haven't made any since last summer. These have all been sitting since last summer, but the layering started to become obvious within a day after sealing into the bottles. It's most obvious at 40degF. Much colder and they're all opaque, much warmer and the demarcation lines between layers aren't evident.
Here's my theory on what is happening; The raw wvo is hydrogenated soy, meat fats and tallows, and breading crumbs, with some water. I think the crumbs retain a lot of the water. Something else, not solid like bread crumbs, also retains a lot of water in this suspension/ emulsion/ solution. I don't know what it is, so I'll call it "other". It's probably just a nature of the oil, or may be really, really fine food particles, or a combination, or the water may concentrate in the fat or tallow. Whatever.
After heating to 250F, the crumbs lose virtually all their water, and cease to be neutrally buoyant. So does the "other", and they'll both separate out, either floating to the top, or sinking to the bottom. At 40degF the "other" is cloudy and very visible settled at the bottom. At 50degF, the dry filtered wvo is a clear honey color, but will still have an ugly gray layer on the bottom, which I call tallow. The tallow finally turns clear at around 80F. The pumping and "water" filtering may be mixing everything together so intimately that it can't separate again.
Which one of these would you want to run in your vehicle? I'd vote for the top layer of dried oil and rough filtered oil, based on appearance, and would filter it better than through the 5-micron water filters. The varying degrees of opacity worry me. I repeated this test last summer, thinking I'd mixed up the bottles the first time.
These samples tell us nothing about engine wear or damage potential, but they're all dry by my standards, yet obviously different from each other. I'm of the impression that better oil will separate without first being "dried", especially in warmer climes. The wvo I've got to work with doesn't. Greasel and Neoteric (and probably others) all recommend finding a different source, but this is more typical of average wvo, and I want to find a way to make it work.
I also have a picture taken with the sun behind the bottles, but hesitate to clog up everyone's servers.

WVO_assorted_samples_at_40F.jpg (171 Kb, 109 downloads) WVO sample bottles

I didn't say that, you drew that inference. Your words NOT mine.
I have no problem with heat settling WVO if one wants to go that route. Being a blender, I don't want to. It also does not go far enough
IMO.

I'll ask you Mark the same as Dana, how do you address condensation? Heat settling is fine but it does not address condensation and this would add free water, exactly what causes quick IP failure.

Bushpig and Johno IMO has a better answer than just heat settling. He suggested an alcohol be added to WVO. Which is just what I'm saying when I speak about diesel emulsions as a model, and this addresses condensate. It has also been shown that the addition of ethyl alcohol can decrease soot and lower the temperature requirement of Striaght WVO from 150 °C to 80 °C
reference

quote:

Originally posted by girl mark:
For instance, 'diesel-water emulsions aren't damaging so water in vegoil must not be' is a sort of logic, if you don't know about the difference between emulsion and other forms of water.

Mark