That whould read .5D

The reactor loop also includes a shell and tube heat exchange for solar heating and a 2KW imersion heater for top up as required, there are several more thermocouples to controll and monitor temp.

Graham, with regards to controll I met a realy swithed on Kewi PLC expert who is interested in my project and lives in Adelaide. He is helping me out and I tracked down a quite sophisticated modern PLC syatem from a foundry at a tiny fraction of the component replacment cost. I still need more thermocouple modules or a large reference compensated interface.

I mate of mine sugested using LM35 sensors which would work and is a cheep option but I already have quite a number of K types in thermowells so I would prefer to use thermocouple if possible. its also a lot less work. Got any ideas? You can get local converter pucks with cold junction compensation but they are expensive and there are none in my salvage colection. Although Im sure the right company in china could sell me some for very litttle if I can find said company. I figure you proably know a bit about this field from a market as well as technical perspective?


The same person suggested using a large valve audio amp as a high voltage square wave generator.

with 3 flash drums, partial solar heating, heated setling tanks and post flash heat recovery heat exchanges. I have lots of temp mesurment to do.


Re auto titration
Im going to try your tumeric in ipa idea and I have a small glass cell that would be perfect but as this is a non esential step (I can still batch titrate) Its highly desirable as i wish to avoid lots of large tanks. I want to be able to pump wet dirty oil and talow of vairable FFA contant in one end and product out the other.I recon I am at least a year away as the full automation of the rest of the process is a huge job. I also want to include a Diesel generator set up so I can use its waste heat for process heating. I plan to fit everything to a 20" flatrack and make it a truly go anywhere mobile plant.

I used to have a life, now I have a biodiesel project. its all got way way out of hand its curently 5 am and I havent left work from yesterday yet. Im suposed to be inspecting a flatrack in 3 hours.

sounds very interesting but I'm still not really following the basic priniciple. Is this based on the work of those cambridge chaps or something else?

hI Ant, The reactor design is based on the cambridge work. There are several comercial plants in operation using this concept?

Regards
Tim

Whoops dose of 5am spinal tap. I dint think I would fit much plant in a 20" flatrack

Lol I just saw 20 feet of course. How on earth do you fit all those baffles inside the pipes?

Gentlemen,

Very nice efforts here. I have a question as I have not received my HV power supply yet (should be soon 1-2 days). Can this be used to separate FFA's from wvo.
The settling process takes a bit of time and I am interested in doing this quickly.

Has anyone tried using their HV unit to drop the FFA's out quickly.?

I am trying to make the best winter bio I can and so use used canola non-hydrogenated, titrating at 4 unsettled and so far after settling, titration has dropped to 2.5 naoh.

It seems that this may work to drop FFA's and maybe water quickly, and then react, then drop glycerine, then drop soap.

This is of course bench racing. Any thoughts?


Forgive me but my processor is in the construction stage so I am putting all the ideas into construction.

It will be three tanks:

1 Tank: Warm, (HV)? Settle, dewater, remove FFA's

2. Tank: React, (HV) drop glycerine

3. Tank: De-methanol, (HV) drop soap, filter

Finished
Thanks

Dale

settle FFA????
FFA do not settle out of wvo.

Dale,

Ant is correct. FFA does not settle out of WVO. You may be referring to the particulate settling of WVO that is typically done by gravity and time. I've applied 2k volts DC current to unsettled/unfiltered WVO to see if it would settle faster. It did not seem to have any affect after 1 hour. I wish it worked, but it doesn't seem to settle WVO faster.

Each baffel has 3 x 4.1mm hole near the OD. These thread onto 4mm SS rods and I had 750 spacers made of 4.1mm ID SS tube.
The whole thing then gets slid into tube and tig'd in place at on end.

Tim

Ahh! was it expensive to get all the bits made Tim?

Dale you could wash your oil with water and settle that and the contaminants out faster with electrostatic fields.

That won't take out ffa either though.

Would clean the oil up as much or better than settling alone though.

spacers coat me 60c AU each and baffel disks about $2.60 each. So It starts to add up but considering its ALL 316 STAINLESS and that run at high enough T&P should be capable of doing up to 50,000L/ week its not all that much money. I used suppliers that already do regular work for my staging company.

Tim

Nice to get a ball park on the cost. I would be very interested to see how it all works out. I'm still cheering for the simplicity of Johno's double pumper but your system may offer advantages when it is up and running. It is certainly interesting to see the cambridge work being put to homebrew use.

It will be three tanks:

1 Tank: Warm, (HV)? Settle, dewater, remove FFA's By Soda ash

2. Tank: React, (HV) drop glycerine

3. Tank: De-methanol, (HV) drop soap, filter



Thanks for the comments. Should be soda ash the FFA's for removal.

Dale

Reading place holder - sorry - had to stop reading somewhere. Amazing thread.

Sorry to be the late one here but I gotta ask..

After 253 postings and over 12,000 views, has anyone actually purified anything with an electrostatic charge yet?

I really, really, really dont want to go back and read all those pages to find out..

Hi Murphy,

It works particularly well on separating glycerol from BD, on dropping water from washed biodiesel, and on DEMOLISHING an emulsion in incompletely washed biodiesel.

I've just made the move from testing an inline separator on the kitchen table to putting it on the processor, to remove glycerol without switching off the circulator pump.

I have had an electrostatic rod separator inside the processor tank for the last 5 batches, which thoroughly drops the glycerol within 15-20 minutes.

But I have always had some glycerol remain in my batches, thanks to various little traps in the pipework.

I ran the inline separator after a 5% pre-wash and although it takes and hour or 2 to get rid of all the glycerol, it does a good job of ensuring the biodiesel is mobile all the time, so never gets a chance to settle into hiding places.

There are a few tricks needed to make it work well, which I'm experimenting with, and will post pics of the 'pretty' installation as soon as it's pretty! I'll be tidying it all up over the Christmas hols - I'm off work for 3 weeks - YESSS!!

There is plenty of scope for experimenting and improving the process - I'd be really happy to have someone else try this so we can share ideas and get it moving on to a stage anyone can build, in the confidence it will give useful results.

I understand from reading the thread that glycerin has lower resistance and so it is advised not to place electrodes in it.

How low is 'low'? What I am getting at is using this to pull soap out of glycerin. Was wondering if lower voltages (say 120 or 240) might work?

Horn

Turns out it's pretty low...

I took line power (~110 VAC @ 60Hz), put it through a full wave bridge rectifier, then put 57k ohm on both lines for current limitation. Put this across a 100 mL glycerin in a small jam jar. Current was ~1mA, but voltage drop across the glycerin was 3 volts. Total voltage was ~108.

So, current limitation was removed completely.

Now I got ~500 mA thru the circuit, along with apparent local boiling at the electrodes. Changing to higher surface area electrodes gave about 1 Amp, with more local boiling, creating a foam at the top of the sample.

Not too effective (at first observation) for soap extraction, but good at heating the sample anyway.

Horn

Hi Graham. Do electrostatic precipitators help settle out suspended water and/or suspended solids from either bio-d or wvo?

takes out suspended water. Solids dunno? doubt it but I could be wrong.