I see this as a FAD. Magnesol was all the rage two years ago and now it's this stuff. I have a bunch of purolite and I plan on using it to learn about the stuff for the sake of learning new things. I already know that I don't need it and will be stingy as I can be when learning about it.

Settling is hard to beat, whether it's cheap slow settling in a drum or fast expensive settling in a centrifuge.

Until they come out with a resin that you can just run bio into right out of the processor with no restrictions on soap or methanol levels
I'm pretty much not interested any more.

I use resin (Purolite). I water washed for over a year and I'll never go back to it.

Using resin
- saves hours of time:
- saves a huge amount on my electricity bill
- saves a huge amount on my hot water bill
- never gives an emulsion
- never gives bad fuel

with water washing these are all big deals.

Jehu, how do you demeth? And how do you know you have demethed enough? Do you settle before dry washing? One more, do you use naoh or koh?

Jehu,

Thank You for speaking up.

What is your typical titration value and what is your process? I really want to know because I've only seen it work well with low titration oils and well settled bio.

How can anyone that wants to produce any real quantity NOT drywash? We plan on getting a purolite setup as soon as we have some cash free. Water washing is a PITA

freesoul,

I'm not saying don't drywash. I don't see ion exchange resins as the only drywash technique.

Hi Rick, Fabricator

My oil varies, but on average it titrates around 7 or 8 (ie 5 + 2 or 3)using NaOH. Ive had some bad oil thats titrated at 9 and 10, which naturally shortens resin life, but bad oil is bad news for any method. I have a one tank Graham Lamming domestic boiler type set-up. I used to use his one day method but I never really got rid of all the soap, which used to drop out in the finished fuel.

After the intial glycerol draining I let the batch sit overnight then drain the residual glycerol off thats dropped out. I dont bother demething, and it doesnt seem to bother the resin. Maybe it gives a haze to the fuel but who cares, the water tests are always fine. Once these start to show soap its time to reduce flow rate, then change the resin when its exhausted.

Any idea of how many gallons of finished fuel you get for whatever your voulume of resin is with this method?

I havent kept count, but its probably around what is claimed, and altho it seems expensive when buying 25Kilos at a time it lasts for ages and is cheap in the long run. Its reliable and very easy to work with.

Jehu,

Glad to hear it works great for you. I was hoping someone using resins for a while would pipe in. That's an interesting bit about the problems you were having with demething. Eurocab was reporting the same thing.

Theres a resin out which can be regenerated almost indefinitely. I'm hoping to find out its name and who sells it over here in UK. I know a guy who's using it but Ive lost touch with him before I can ask him about it.

One thing about high titrating oil - once the glycerol has been drained a few litres of hot water sprinkled into the batch without mixing and drained off in the morning will remove some of the contaminants and increase resin life. It doesnt take much time. I used to combine GL's 5% prewash with resin but this introduced dampness into the BD which the resin didnt like; adding a little hot water doesnt doesnt have that problem.

Lewatit GF202 see here for details and links to the web site.

Thanks Rick. I'll find out who stocks the Lewatit. Informative site too. Cheers.

To use the Lewatit, you have to remove the methanol first. It does not need to go all the way down to meet the standards for methanol, but it needs to be close. The best way to use it is after the GL1 then settling till the fuel clears up before going to the resin.

This is not the first time the value of using resins for biodiesel waterless washing, has come up in the forum.

In fact I don't even like to call it a washing process at all since it is really designed to be a purification process.

And it's important for any potential user (industrial or home brewer) to understand the parameters of its successful implementation in their particular process: methanol removal and all.

But like Jehu, once you have dealt with the technicalities - resin purification is the most elegant way to ASTM and I would say it is the most environmentally friendly with perhaps only 2 exceptions:
1)if your using potassium as your catalyst and using the wash water as a fertilizer (like Fabricator)
2)or if you have a distillation column and your recycling the water and reclaiming the methanol and the distillation column/vacuum system uses either a regenerative heat exchanger or some other sustainable energy source for heating.

Fabricators concern with methanol removal is well taken however in practice it doesn't turn out to be that daunting (certainly not anymore difficult than water washing and drying) - only a different process to learn, instead of removing residual water, your removing residual methanol.

Even though there isn't a simple home brewer methanol removal test ; once you have removed enough methanol that soaps and glycerin are falling out readily – you have a qualitative measure which is good enough for a home brewer to feel reasonably certain that the impurity concentration is in an acceptable range for ion exchange resin purification.

I believe that for the home-brewer there are two key factors which will determine if resin purification is worth it or not:

1) Choosing to recover methanol from the Biodiesel vs. doing NO methanol recovery or only doing methanol recovery from the glycerin by-product

2) Being picky about your fuel and wanting to ensure it meets ASTM with no other impurities (also from our testing it improves cold weather performance).

The first factor is important because there are many people who run unwashed biodiesel and others who wash their biodiesel and don’t see an economic value in recovering the 20% -25% excess methanol used to make the biodiesel since it amounts to only about 2% of the biodiesel.

(note: if you are going to recover this 20-25% it amounts to at least 37 cents per gallon of methanol purchased and will require some form of distillation anyway)

Fabricator for instance uses potassium as his catalyst and recovers methanol in his Fabulous glycerin pot-still, does water washing and centrifuging of the biodiesel to a very successful and economical product!

Others like myself do a single stage transesterification using a sodium catalyst, centrifuge to separate, methanol recovery, gross soap and glycerin removal and ion exchange to a very successful and economical product.

I just don’t want to deal with water – either as a waste stream or in my biodiesel. The way I see it you can either test for water as an impurity in the fuel or test for methanol as an impurity in the fuel. In either case I’m going to remove the impurity and I’ve chosen to deal with the methanol rather than deal with water.

Finally if you can simply mist the biodiesel with a very small amount of water (as Jehu suggest) and sort of sweep out the gross soaps - then that is one more way to make using resins even easier.

GCG

By-the way I think there is a fairly cheap testing method for determining methanol concentration in biodiesel after the initial settling or after methanol removal.

I'll let you know what my experiments turn up.

Fabricator - are you saying that the centrifuge (spinner) can remove soap and glycerin out of crude biodiesel to less than solubility levels like ion exchange resins do?

GCG

I am not positive yet, my first effort was cut short by the bio obviously polymerizing from my spray demething and then fuging, that was just too much bio air contact, my new processor is now set up with a condenser so my next attempt will not include spray demething, but my fuge was definately collecting a LOT of soap when I cut the experiment short because of the polymerizing, I think I posted the pics above somewhere.

GCG,

To be specific. It's damn near impossible to meet ASTM specs with WVO (not new) using ion exchange resins in the manner dictated by the manufacture.

Jehu is not meeting the specs, and I doubt many that are using USED OIL are meeting the FULL ASTM or EU specs. These resins were designed and intended to be used on NEW oil. To make it economical, large volumes are needed to justify the cost of the equipment needed like centrifuges, coalesers, and flash evaporators.

These resins are simply polishers. If you remove the methanol using one of any method described on this forum and settle for a few days, you have removed the vast majority of the impurities. That in itself is probably enough for most homebrewers.

Some home brewers like Jehu and Eurocab are having trouble getting enough methanol out of their biodiesel to prevent soaps from dropping out later and clogging fuel filters. An ION exchange resin used here as a polisher would be effective. We do have other polishers available to us as well.

Talk to the manufacture. These resins were not intended to be used on oils with more than about 2% FFA content. That mostly limits it to new oil. One manufacture put it this way, "If there is a measurable FFA content in the feedstock oil, we recommend using our Acid catalyst bead to perform an acid eserification"

Talk to them and you find out they are expecting you to be using premix. You know that stuff that is so commonly used in commercial plants that starves the soponification of water thereby passing most of the FFA through the process untouched.

Using these beads for homebrew is a jurry rig. Like using the chevy chevette to haul a cord of wood.

That said, we do have the advantage of brewing to need and are not required to meed any standards for our fuels. Jehu's fuel meets his needs. If you know going in that your not going to be able to meet all the standards and want to do it anyway, that's great.

It's just nobody is pointing out the little things like more than 750ppm of soap going into the H+ resins and you wont pass for acid number on the way out.

This is homebrew, we have lots of soap. None of the resins were designed to deal with the soap we have in our bio. If your using other techniques to successfully knock down the soap levels they why do you need the resins?

A centrifuge will not remove the soaps below the solubility level of what comes out. It will remove the soaps below the solubility level of the bio going into it. In the middle, it flashes off methanol thereby altering the solubility level and getting more out than is possible with a simple filter.