I was thinking if I go to a dry wash system if the budget permits than I could use my wash -dry tank as a second reactor. Water washing is time consuming and where you I get rid of the wash water? What happens to the residue from dry wash?

Heat,

I burn the spent wood shavings. I rejuvenate the resin (Thermax) with a methanol bath. I use the dirty methanol in the acid stage of acid/base process. HTH.

Euro you use two towers I take it, one with wood shavings and the other with Thermax. The wood shavings are the first wash and the Thermax is a final wash? How much bio can you are thru a column before cleanings?

Heat
The dry Wash Resin can be reionized several times before the resin is completely spent. Then you can dry it out and toss it in the trash or use it as compost. As far as the amount you can run through, that al depends on the size tower you use. Purolite PD 206 will wash 100-200 gallons per pound. 6" tower with 25 lbs of PD 206 should wash 3750 Gallons of BD.(using 150) That also depends on how well you demeth the BD to. Hope this helps you.

Heat,

I used to use a tower for wood shavings. I now just use a round container and keep the BD circulating until most of the soap is gone. Then it goes through the resin columns. The tower became too big a pain to change out the shavings.

If I had a 55 gal. drum of wood shavings and recirculated from the bottom into the top "wood" that that work to remove most of the soap? I would think hardwood shaving would work better but thats just a guess. The pitch from softwoods I would think might cause a problem. Just a guess.

quote:

That also depends on how well you demeth the BD to.

So the residual methanol in the bio effects the dry wash. One concern I have , from what I understand dry washing doesn,t remove the residual methanol like water washing does,and storing bio in the basement of my house with some methanol in it could be a problem. Maybe the amount isn't that critical? So when it come to dry washing demeth first and than wash?

Dry washing will remove trace methanol,Not a lot. A little methanol running through the tower will not hurt. Storing the bd in the basement with a little methanol is still less of a hazard than gasoline or a bottle of heat.

Demeth as much as you can then dry wash.

Heat,

Like my partner Chad likes to say, "the sooner you go to Dry washing technology, the sooner it pays for itself!"

Most resins when being used for purifying used cooking oils get about 100 gallons per pound, however water in your biodiesel can impact this greatly - we have people reporting 65-85 gallons per pound due to their particular high water content nearing 1%.

But keep in mind, that flushing the resin is not the same as regenerating the resin and you should get several flushes out of the gel-type resins like Purolite's PD206 and Amberlite's BD10 Dry before it looses its ionic properties. These rinses will continue to drive the effective cost of the resin down per gallon processed.

Thermax's T-45 BD macroporous resin has the greatest life expectancy and the cost per gallon when properly used should go to less than a penny per gallon of biodiesel purified. Additionally the macroporous resin doesn't rely solely on ion exchange for the removal of soaps and metals, since it actually engulfs them in the adsorbed glycerin caught in the resin beads matrix. This also greatly extends the usable life of the resin.

A lot of people (particularly the resin companies) like to spend a lot of time discussing how to "change-out their resins" and many column producers go to great lengths to build in cool gizmos and expensive resin removal systems to accommodate this however if you use the macroporous resin properly and have the regeneration protocols in the event you actually do exhaust it's ionic charge - you never really have to remove the resin... ...(it is rinsed out and regenerated in the same column it operates normally in!)

Something to think about,

GCG

Hey Heat take a look at our dry wash tower flushing video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nMsqTujGWI

This says more than I can write about...


GCG