No problem, at the levels I get it down to with my fuges it amounts to four or five points.

quote:

Originally posted by fabricator:
No problem, at the levels I get it down to with my fuges it amounts to four or five points.

Wow, do you use a centrifuge specifically to separate soaps from bio, or is this the result after separating bio from the byproduct? At what level does your starting oil titrate?

I let my batches settle over night then start fuging, my oil typically Ts at 9-11,
I use the acid base process.

Fabricator,

How long do you typically fuge your finished fuel? What temps do you find works best for fuging? Do you know what your starting soap levels are after settling? I have been fuging our incoming oil, but have lately been working with settling and wood chipping our demethed fuel. I am almost inclined to try fuging, just to see what happens. I'm trying to get a process down that works for me in 80 gallon batches, because soon I'll be steping up to 200 gallon batches. our settling tank has outlet pipes at different levels, and we are still trying to decide how soon to open each of them. the lowest is only 4" off the bottom. after 4 days, the lowest drain tests at 425. I'm not sure if it is too close to the bottom, causing the stuff on the bottom to get stirred up causing my numbers to go high. If the fuge will work, I'll go that route. we shoot for our finished fuel to be below 100 ppm.

Thanks,
Road Runner

it depends on your process, your batch size and the volume your fuge can handle, if you use koh and 5% prewash and one 2-4 gpm fuge on 100 gallons it's gonna take a long time 30-40 hours, if you can turn your volume over once a minute it will take considerably less, it's all about the time your volume of oil/bio spends in the fuge, the more times per hour you turn your volume over the more time the oil/bio spends at high G.

we typicaly settle for a week, using naoh. no prewash. We're still testing the process to see what works the best. I tried fuging some water washed fuel both cold, and hot, but didn't really get anything in the fuge (oc-50) I have also tried some fresh from the demether fuel in the fuge, but it very quickly cloged up with soap. haven't tried any on settled fuel. I was just wondering what you did that seemed to work for you. right now I am working in 110 gallon batches of finished fuel at a time to filter. Wood chips work for us most of the time, right now we are woking on a sand filter setup with sand blasting slag as media. seems to work as good as wood chips, with out the fire hazard. (we had a barrel of shavings and bio go up in smoke spontaneously. ) single passes though 1 micron filters don't really get the numbers down enough. nor does single or short duration passes through wood chips. I think we are going to do a batch of pre-wash soon and see what that does for us.
thanks
road runner

I demeth my bio in my processor, this is ultra important, until the methanol is gone you won't find any soap in your fuge, last year I had two Spinner II960s on my wash tank which amounted to around 6gpm and it took from 30-40 hours to get the bio down to 50ppm soap, this year I added the big Spinner that will do 18-19 gpm at 100psi, so I will have a gpm of 23-25 this year so I hope to reduce the washing time by 50% or more.