So I now have a dieselcraft centrifuge and it works amazing for cleaning used oil. Night and day difference in not that long of a time.

I made some biodiesel recently and used magnesol to clean the bio and want to know if i can centrifuge the magnesol out effectivley. The biodiesel seems too thin compared to the oil to work really well. Using oil we can get the pressure up to 90psi easily, but the biodiesel we can only get up to 70psi. Because of this the centrifuge won't spin full speed. On the bottom of the rotor are jets that the liquid shoots out of to spin the rotor. I was thinking maybe i could replace these with ones with smaller holes to allow the biodiesel to build up more pressure and hence make the thing spin the correct speed like the oil does. All this was done with the oil and biodiesel at 170F.

So... any experience or ideas?

Any chance of pictures and a run down on how the thing works?

quote:

Originally posted by Raften:
Any chance of pictures and a run down on how the thing works?

Yeah, I really need to take pictures, everyone wants to see it. It will unfortunately have to wait till after thanksgiving as I'll be out of town for a while until next Monday. But the rundown is we have the centrifuge mounted to our water heater reactor and we have a pump from dieselcraft that can supply very high pressure at 2GPM. We heat the oil to around 170F in the water heater then turn on the pump and spin the stuff. We have to put a slight vacuum on the water heater in order to get it to function correctly as the oil that falls out the bottom of the centrifuge can't fall out of the way fast enough through the 3/4 inch coupler to the water heater. When that happens the oil builds up under the rotor and then the rotor slams into the oil and slows it almost completely down. With the vacuum it's just enough to help pull the oil out of the way and keep everything happy.

Our oil we did wasn't too bad to begin with but it had a bit of flour in it and you couldn't see through it at all. After only 30 minutes the stuff was sparkling clear. This was with the 25 gallon test batch we did. The 50 gallon batch took just a bit longer.

Now we're trying to use magnesol which we put into the biodiesel and circulated. And now we're trying to spin out, but not with much success.

yaric, I'll be really interested in how it works with really wet oil. I don't get it often but am dealing with some now. It seems someone in the kitchen poured a mixture of dishwasher cleaning solution and water in my barrel. Talked to the chef and he told me he would try to educate someone. Right now I have heated it and will just let it sit while I am away. Anyway, please post if it does a good job of cleaning up wet oil.

I have a friend who got the same unit but has not hooked it up yet.

From what I've read it works well for drying oil as well as cleanning it. Our oil is usually pretty dry though, but we'll see I guess.

Now.. if i could just figure out the biodiesel in the centrifuge.

Yaric, I have a dieselcraft OC20 with motor and pump supplied by Rick at B100supply.com. I have no problem getting up to 120 PSI with this setup, but I run at 100 PSI (leaving the return valve open some). I filter out magnesol with a sock filter in a housing first. Once that begins to become to less effective (due to the smaller magnesol particles passing right through) I fire up the centrifuge and check on it hourly. It cleans out magnesol amazingly!

If you're having trouble getting the right PSI, make sure your rotor is being put back together correctly. The arrows on the bottom and side must line up for it to be balanced. Also, the rotor must be be clean, or that could cause an imbalance. Beyond that, make sure your pump is powerful enough and that you're not trying to push too much magnesol through it at one time. Too much magnesol will slow it down and clog it real fast.

Would one of these centrifuges work to remove soap from biodiesel that has had the residual methanol removed? I currently do the GL 1 day process and then spray/filter to remove the soap. I am getting weary of having to clean/replace the filter socks.

Anybody doing this?

Well we talked to John Nightingale at Dieselcraft just earlier and he told us we got some bad batch rotors. Apparently someone built them improperly. He says the biodiesel is leaking past the brass bearings not allong it to come up to the proper pressure. He is shipping us two new ones. I hope they work properly this time. Our pump is a brand new oberdofer thinger so it should be fine. It comes up to full pressure running the veg oil, just not the bio. The biodiesel looks almost clear so i'm positive we don't have too much mangesol. I'm sure it's just a defective rotor like John says.

quote:

Originally posted by jon h.:
Would one of these centrifuges work to remove soap from biodiesel that has had the residual methanol removed? I currently do the GL 1 day process and then spray/filter to remove the soap. I am getting weary of having to clean/replace the filter socks.

Anybody doing this?

In theory it can. it removes anything that would normally drop to the bottom by gravity. It has such a hight g-force that it should be able to remove the soap, but I haven't tried this. The OC-20 only holds about 10oz of material before it needs to be cleaned.

Have you thought about filtering with a sock filter first, and then switching to centrifuge?

I think I would do something like that. I have found that circulating while spraying the BD onto the surface of the BD causes the soap to flocculate (clump up) and float to the surface. I can then scoop out lots of it. From there I would like to try centrifuging.

Thanks for the info.

I use KOH and my soap either collects at the bottom in a jelly like mass that does not move easily or foams up on top. I circulate spray the biodiesel and scoop the foaming soap off of the top. Then I add magnesol, stir, and filter through a sock filter and housing. Then I filter with OC-20.

Would you happen to know what the soap content is after you sock filter and then after the CF?

No, I don't. Next time, I'll test it.

I use an OC50 and the pump supplied by Rick at b100supply. It works amazing. The biopro does all the drying and the centrifuge is just an extra step I've added. Just a testiment to how well a BioPro does, I have run the centrifuge on the last 5 batches and have a film about .05mm on the inside of the centrifuge. Essentially, there is no glycerin or contamination in my fuel. I love the BioPro and the centrifuge. Stuart

Hello sshelly

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Originally posted by sshelly:
I have run the centrifuge on the last 5 batches and have a film about .05mm on the inside of the centrifuge.

Do you mean that the BioPro does not wash out all of the glycerine and there is a film of glycerine on your centrifuge?

Jon,

I've found that the centrifuge excelles at initial cleaning and dewatering, like the SVO guys are doing. It also does a great job of final polishing and removing that last bit of water on the end like Stuart is seeing.

Soap removal is not it's best function. In my opinion it takes too long and requires too many rotor cleanings. Even when I used traditional methods to cut the soap down under 200ppm, it still took way too long to get it down under 50ppm.

quote:

Originally posted by Tilly:
Hello sshelly

quote:

Originally posted by sshelly:
I have run the centrifuge on the last 5 batches and have a film about .05mm on the inside of the centrifuge.

Do you mean that the BioPro does not wash out all of the glycerine and there is a film of glycerine on your centrifuge?

I have yet to see ANY water wash method that removes ALL of the free glycerine. The centrifuge is just getting that last little bit that may be left after water washing.