Ok. I'm going to blow my own horn here for the next few minutes. I want to show what is possible from things made from other peoples garbage. Ok, not all of it is garbage, but most is. The photos that follow are of my burner.. Its my own design that is based on a hybrid system using principles of fuel atomization that are already known. I didn't re-invent any wheels here.. What I did do was to take the best characteristics of the various different well known designs and mix them into a configuration which utilizes the best things about each design..(That's what I think I did anyhow) Several of my friends have taken a look at it and are suggesting I call a patent attorney. I'm not so sure myself.. There is nothing really all that original about it.. Or is there? Still figuring that out..

Anyhow, the temps were in the 25 degF range this afternoon so I was using it to keep the shop warm.. No photos of the combustion chamber or heat exchanger system available yet.

Picture 1
This is a photo of the entire unit. It requires 115 volts and 80 PSI of air pressure. I have a 30 gallon piece of crap no-brand air compressor and it turns on about once every 2 hours. It uses such a tiny amount of air, a bicycle hand pump could be used if needed..


Picture 2
The stack going up through the roof. The inside pipe is stainless steel while the outside is galvanized. Believe it or not, I found 25 feet of this stuff in a garbage pile. I would never attempt to exhaust a device like this without some kind of high quality stainless pipe made for the purpose.. I can turn up the burner so high that the first 4 feet of that pipe will glow red. Normal exhaust temps at the burner are around 450-550.. A little high but hey, its made out of junk.. What can I say..
Notice the lack of insulation in the building..


Picture 3
Tank hatch.. as you can see, a few small details need to be polished off.. The vice clamps are holding a restrictor plate on the inlet of the blower.. Soon, there will be a ducting elbow there being feed hot air for combustion.


Picture 4
Panel box. Controls preheater, combustion fan, circulation fan, and pump. The large fan on top of the unit is a 3 speed fan but I only have a light switch to work with.. I'll be looking for a suitable 4 position switch soon..


Picture 5
A peek at the underside. The red thing is the burner assembly. It unbolts from the heat exchanger and drops straight out the bottom. I still have to make a small gaurd for the thermostat. The fuel tank and furnace can unbolt from each other for transporation.


Picture 6
Ya cant really see anything but what the heck, I'll post it anyhow..


Picture 7
That's the stack.. The unit is putting out about 150,000 btu's or so. It's running on pure black used motor oil that was poured in as a cold gloppy mess... There is absolutly no visible smoke.. Just a wave of heat. It does smoke a little bit during the first 5 minutes or so of start up from a dead cold 25 degF.


One thing I have learned is that a variable fuel pump feed is a must. Also, I found a fault in it that I can't seem to find an easy way around. While it will burn completely smokeless (smokes-less?) on any oil, it requires a fuel air adjustment to achieve maximum heat output when switching fuels. Biodiesel only contains about 120,000 btu's per gallon where used motor oil has almost 200,000.. To get a proper hot burn, I have to either turn up or turn down the fuel volume and open or close the combustion air restrictor.. Its basically turning 2 knobs.. easy enough but it still has to be done manually if you're switching fuel type. I estimate this unit to be capable of producing a minimum heat output of about 70,000 btu's/hr and a maximum of 200,000 btu's/hr.

There are no pots to clean, no nozzles to clog, no filters to change. Most of the burn chamber seems to scrub itself clean. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to vacuum out the bottom once per season. The electric pre-heater only works for start up and then shuts down.

I should also say that the combustion chamber is only about 25 gallons in volume. While it will perform at 200,000 btu's, it does not do so as efficiently as it does at a lower setting of around 125,000.

I also need to add more vents.. The air comes out at about an 85 to 140 degree temperature rise. (depending on settings). It comes out strong enough to blow your cloths around and all the dust on the floor..

Well, that's it. I'm still polishing a few things and already have several major improvements in mind for Version 2.0.

WOW what a ton of work you have put into this, I'm impressed at how you have tackled each one of the various details that needed to be worked out to produce a useable safe heater. I look forward to hearing how it works over the winter. Keep up the good work. Cheers Dan

Holy mackerel Batman. Well done.
Murphy you are an inspiration to us all.
Do you belong to Yahoo groups Altfuelfurnace or Wastewatts? Both of those groups would love to see what you have done here.
I guess I can ask a few questions?
First, do you have a regular life? Obviously you are one heck of a welder, and fabricator, need we ask what you do for a living. I was reading about Christopher Michael Langan the other day because he is also severely gifted, at wikipedia they use a word to describe him which I was unfamiliar with, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism
Is this how you would descibe yourself?
Anyway nice job.
I am also an accomplished heating engineer, I managed to get a wood heater in my shop this afternoon
Brian

Thats nice work Murphy.

bigblock,
Thanks! 2 weeks to design it, 2 weeks to build it..throw in a few extra days to work out bugs.

Boss,
I belong to both, (I think).. I never read either of them and I'm not even sure if my membership is still valid.. One is dedicated to gun burners and the moderator denied my first post!!! Ugg! Sent me a polite email telling me he wanted to keep the forum dedicated to gun type spray burners.
That was about it for me and anything alt dot related..

Who of us has a regular life? Define regular...
I can teach anyone with half a brain to weld inside of an hour.. Its not that difficult of a thing to do.. As for the fabrication, I am limited to my tools.. Oh how I so want a box brake.. Anyone willing to donate a lathe? LOL..
As for my career, I was an engineer of sorts for about 15 years. I spent the time designing and building industrial processing machinery. My job was to create machines that peform a task and then train the people to operate them.

As for autodidacticism, I wish I was that smart. I read every issue of popular science and a few others and I've been amazed at what some of these scientists are creating. There was even an article in one issue about combustion technologies.. Good magazine to read.. There is stuff in there all the time about biodiesel.. One guy built a special boat that runs on biodiesel to circumnavigate the globe in some record breaking event. To gain popularity, he even had lipo-suction and used the resulting human body fat to make some of the fuel he will use for the event.. I $hit you not.. the boat looks like a space-ship on water and driven by diesel engines.

Heating engineer? Got any spare parts you want to part with? I'm looking for a fireye or honeywell unit with a cadium sulfide flame detector.. I don't want to buy one new that's for sure..

I've been wondering about something and can't seem to find the data..
What is the frequency difference (wavelength) of a petro oil flame vs. veg oil flame? I'm not so concerned with actual numbers as I am with knowing if the flame detector can see both.. I'm guessing it will.. That could be an expensive goof if I'm wrong.

This unit I built seems to work good.. I want to build a large unit.. To heat water at around 400,000+ btu's.. But I want to also be able to burn wood in it like a wood stove.. I'm thinking something like a www.centralboiler.com but with a veg oil / petro oil conversion to burn wood alone, oil alone, or oil and wood together.. Basically an incinerator with a water jacket..

I'm wondering how the EPA would view the commerical burning of glycerin by-product for heating puproses.. I need to start measuring ash content..

Thanks for all the nice comments.. Its going to save me allot of money on heating my shop.. probably to the tune of $250 a month.. I think I put $100 into building this.

Regarding the fire eye things seeing different flames. I know nothing really but remember discussions on torpedo heaters stating that you had to add a bit of kerosene in to keep them lit when burning bio. Otherwise the fire eye couldn't see the flame and turned it off.

Murph, Nice job! What kind of burner are you using? Pot? Babington? Mobius Pot?

Is the box with blue ribs and a knob the metering pump?

quote:

Originally posted by canolafunola:
Murph, Nice job! What kind of burner are you using? Pot? Babington? Mobius Pot?

Is the box with blue ribs and a knob the metering pump?

Its kind of like a babington but without the ball.. Kind of like a mobious but without the pot or pan... Kind of like a siphon nozzle but no fuel jet nozzle..

I am passing a stream of air through a continuously flowing fluid bed. But the stream of air doesn't really pass through the fluid.. it sort of sucks it in like a siphon. There are no spherical objects, no pans or pots.. but like a babington, there is a sump and like a mobious there is a puddle.. it stays exactly the same size (1.25 inches dia for this burner).. The air jet nozzles are sizable and replaceable.. No gunk builds up anywhere on the burner unit because it never gets to hot to touch. So, I got a stream of atomized oil being blasted away.. this stream is then ignited.. Once ignited it requires the addition of extra oxygen.. So my combustion stream flows through a stainless steel tube that has very small holes drilled in it.. The air around the tube swirls into the holes and creates a tornado effect on the fire..
The fire blasts out of the end of the short tube and the hot gases enter the heat exchanger. While I am still playing with it, I get 3 or 4 inches of blue flame that turns to an additional 10 to 14 inches of yellow..

I am about to super heat the compressed air so the atomization is done at over 750 degF instead of cold compressor air.. I'm hoping this will perform sort of a pyro-catalytic cracking in the few milliseconds before the atomized oil is combusted.. It should be an interesting experiment.. The end goal is a solid blue flame of course..

The box with the ribs is the metering pump.. I need to find something smaller and better..

With respect to the question about different wavelengths being generated by veg oil burning vs. dino oil burning. I have looked through my copy of "Honeywell Flame Safeguard Controls" There are three types of optical detectors suitable for oil fired burners, Photocell, Infrared, and Ultraviolet. Of the three the photocell style can only be used with oil fired burners, gas burners do not put out enough visible light to work. I didn't find a reference to anything which would suggest that there should be any practical difference in how the detector would work with either fuel veg or dino. Our older boilers use the same lead sulfide detectors for both gas and oil with only the introduction of a small diameter orfice for the oil. In short if it works for dino it should work for Veg or BD. The Honeywell book is a great reference for flame safeguard systems. Cheers Dan

Thanks bigblock,,

Only thing is, it might be a mute point at this time.
Seeing that it works so good and I'm so happy with the performance, i've been talking about it..
I think its already sold..
I have two different people that were about to buy one anyhow.

So, time to go buy some propane to keep myself warm while I build version 2.0..

do you have a thermocouple or something incase of flameout, to keep fuel from flooding over?? Or could one be adapted?? like a thermocouple actuating a solinoid valve on oil feed? Tigman

quote:

Originally posted by tigman:
do you have a thermocouple or something incase of flameout, to keep fuel from flooding over?? Or could one be adapted?? like a thermocouple actuating a solinoid valve on oil feed? Tigman

There is no need for it..
1. The system is an active sump. There is always oil flowing over and back to the tank. If the flame cut out, it would just soak the combustion chamber walls with a film of oil and then drip back down to the bottom and run back into the fuel tank through a pipe.

2. I have already tested the system in a worst case senario. I heated it up to operating temperature, then cut out the flame on purpose.. Then re-started the fuel feed to see if it would explode, re-ignite, or what..

Here's what happened..
Most of the time it just re-ignited itself and kept burning. If it doesnt re-ignite, it produces lots of smoke until it cools off on its own.
In all cases, nothing bad really happened..

I am however having a few issues relating to design flaws.
The other day, I had someone checking it out.. Anyhow, the unit had been running for about 5 hours already and heating the shop just fine..The unit was turned down to a low fire (70K to 100K btu's) to just maintain the 60 deg temps in the shop.. (it was in the low 20's outside) Anyhow, the person asked me how long it takes to get the shop heated up to a comfortable temperature. So to answer their question, I let them know the unit was on low-fire and I showed them what it does when I turn up the juice.. I cranked it all the way up.. They were very impressed with the heat output. temps in the shop increased to about 65 or 70 degrees in the 15 minutes they were standing there.. Well, they left to take care of whatever.. and it was about my time to go home too.. So I shut down the burner.. It didnt shut down!!!! There was still a tiny flame inside the fuel atomization device. I sat there watching it through the view hole to see what it would do.. It turned my fluidic bed into a miniature pot burner!!! Wholy $hit!!!! That things not supposed to get hot enough to do that.. I sat there for a half an hour watching this thing burn.. the unit was OFF.. No air flow, no fuel flow, no nothing.. There is about 1 pint of fluid in the atomization assembly.. it just kept burning.. I could feel the assembly heating up from the outside..

Its not supposed to do that!!!! So today, I need to go in and run a few more experiments.. I think I'm going to change some of the combustion air flow paths..

Going back through my notes, I figured out why its happening.. When I designed and tested the burner concept, I did so using Waste Vegetable Oil.. Its flash point is around 450 to 500 degF where as the flash point of motor oil is only around 150 or so..

So, when the fluidic bed heat that 150 mark (or so), it was able to maintain self ignition.. Very bad..

Gotta fix it..

Murphy -- Is the incoming oil already heated to the 150 deg point or is it because the metal components of the fluidic bed assembly is heating the oil to it's ignition point ? I am about to add a oil preheat assembly (water heater element in a pipe) to my old syphon gun burner, I intend to make up a temp controller that will allow me to adjust the preheat of the oil depending on if it is motor oil or veg or a blend.

In the picture above you indicate that the red assembly is the burner unit, in a previous post you indicated that you could run up to 5 burners, would that be 5 individual units as shown in red or some other concept ?

You have a water heater thermostat mounted to the red burner unit, does this control a heating element to preheat the oil, I assume there is a water heater element screwed into the left end of this burner unit ? (I don't have a clue as to why there is an open-topped vent pipe above the heater ?, or do I see a flue or heat exchanger preheated fuel tube feeding into the top of the open pipe ?).
I considered this type thermostat for my syphon burner preheater but these thermostats only go up to 150 deg f so don't think this will be hot enough to preheat veg, altfuelfurnace posts mostly say 250 deg f, some even 300 deg f, for reliable ignition. Hate to go that hot as testing with the flash evaporator indicates the inside of all the plumbing grows a rind of polimerized oil over time at this high a temp even if there is no air present.

Also - Did your cold start electric ignition unit end up being bases on glowplugs for the ignition heat ?

Tim,
Yes, the oil is preheated. There are 2 different pre-heat mechanisms in play.. There is a 220 Volt/4500 Watt (low density water heater element) heater in the red pipe on the burner.. (that's why the conduit box is at the end).. This heater is run on 110 volts to produce around 1100 watts output power. The thermostat turns it on and off as required but its only used during warm up. Once the unit is at operating temperature, I turn the heater element off. The fuel line wraps around the heat exchanger a few times and when at operating temp, the oil comes out at a toasty 140 deg or so.. Its actually a bit hotter than what I want so I was thinking of shortening my pre-heat line.

I have done allot of research and experimentation and can tell you a few things about electrically pre-heating your combustion oil.

a) Heating veg oil is a no-brainer.. Veg oil doesn't out-gas, doesn't really clump, and is almost impossible to keep hot enough for self-ignition.

b) Motor oil requires special handling. If you try to heat it with to much electrical power, it will out-gas.. Local boiling around the heating element will generate a boiling action. When that gas reaches the fuel nozzle, the unstable delivery of fuel can cause a flame-out. While I doubt it would affect a pot burner, it will put out the flame on any of the atomization types. The other thing motor oil does when heated electrically is that it clumps.. Small bits begin to cover the heating element. The best way to pre-heat motor oil is to use water.. Get the water to just short of boiling, run the oil line through it. In this way, the oil gets pre-heated without local over-temperatures to create any gassing effect. The other thing that can be done is to design the pre-heating system so that the oil is flowing through it at a rate greater than 1 foot per second on any contact surfaces.

Multiple Burners:
The Red thing on my burner is the assembly where the oil is preheated, atomized and delivered to the flame. It extends into the bottom of the heat exchanger about 10 inches.. (the part you can't see). I can install multiple burners on a single heating system but it would have to be designed into it beforehand.. If I remove the red thing, I could modify it to fit up to 3 atomization devices. This one only has an 5 inch x 5 inch area to do that.. The only downfall is that I would be forced to fire all 3 at the same time. If I made multiple red assemblies, I could then turn burners on and off at will while the rest continue to fire.

As for the red pipe that is vertical and looks like its open at the top.. (copper line going into it with a rag plugging the hole).. This is where my fuel is dripped into the delivery device.. It is a self leveling system.. But I have a design flaw in it that I'd rather not go into detail about.. (It would take me 10 pages to explain the problem and I'm not 100% convinced I even understand what the problem is yet.) Yes, the copper line going into the top of it is where my fuel comes from. That copper line is wrapped around my heat exchanger and once the unit gets up to temperature, it pre-heats the oil so the electric element isn't doing any work. The only flaw with it is that my unit can be tuned to variable heat output levels.. This affects the pre-heat temperature which effects everything else.. (another design flaw).

My electric preheat temperature is set to only 100 degrees.. Motor oil or veg oil.. Doesn't matter.. it will light waste motor oil at anything over 50 degF but its a sloppy burn.. It will light WVO at anything over 90 degrees (just needs a thin liquid).. The funny thing about motor oil is that it ignites really easy but will burn sloppy if everything is not set right.. With WVO, its not so easy to ignite it, but once burning, it burns really good even if the air flow settings are a bit off.. The other thing I like about the WVO is that it has a cleaning effect on everything.. It seems to react with any motor oil residue and scrub it off..

I junked the electric ignition idea.. I was using a glow plug but it didn't work out like I thought it would.. While it does the job, its just not something I liked.. It takes to long to get hot.. I just light my burner manually now with a lighter or propane torch.. Once lit, it runs all day long anyhow.. My work shop has the insulation value of a canvas tent so if I turn off the heat, the shop will be cold inside of 10 or 15 minutes..

Let me tell you something about motor oil vs. veg oil.. Motor oil is so freaking hard to get to burn correctly.. If you put in to little combustion air, it will smoke and cover everything with an oily ash that builds up like a stalagmite.. If you put in to much combustion air, it cools the flame off to much and while it may not smoke, the ash build up comes back...

Burning WVO is easy.. the stuff burns clean, leaves almost no ash behind, and it doesn't seem to really care of you are a bit rich or lean with the air. From what I read, most reported problems are related to ignition. I don't have that problem since my flame is lit with combustion air off..

The gun style burners have a problem igniting waste veg oil because the spark ignition module isnt big enough.. Seems to me, they solve this problem by heating the WVO to some pretty high temps.. But I think a MUCH better solution would be to provide a much hotter spark instead.. Perhaps 2 ignition transformers working together.. 2 sparks gotta be better than one right? I wonder if that would even work..

OK - Thanks for the loads of info, I will have to see how to apply some of this to my oil preheating attempts.

I assume that your low-watt heating element is the normal full-length type (element is about 11 inches long) that extends almost all the way from the left end of the burner pipe inward almost to the upright atomizing pipe that goes up into the burner box. Is the 1100 watts at your recirculating fuel flow rate enough heat to cause motor oil to have the clumping problem ?

Reading over the "black gold" waste oil burner web site they indicate that 160 deg f is the ideal preheat temp for used motor oil as it is below both the outgassing temp and the clumping temp. One of there selling points is the supposidly advanced design of there oil preheater. There burner is of the standard becket style but using a syphon nozzle and they removed the normal suntec fuel pump and replaced it with a carbon vane type air pump, another of there selling points is an advanced design electric fuel pump feed setup that supposidly compinsates for fuel thickness, this pump is prior to the fuel heater.

I will finish up the fuel heater for the syphon burner and give it a try but from what you indicated here my watt-density may be a problem, won't know til I try it.
I am using one of the short 6 inch 1450 watt 110 water heater elements inside of a 8 inch length of 1 1/2 inch pipe, chamber holds about a pint. The syphon burner unit states a flow of 1.4 G/h in it's factory configuration, I don't need nearly the 1.4 G/H amount of heat for any of my applications so I had intended to put needle valves on both the fuel line and the atomizing syphon air line, this should allow very fine control of any burn rate lower than the 1.4 G/H. There is also provisions for adjusting the amount of additional combustion air that is blown throught the flame retention head, plenty of things to tweek on this burner.

This burner will be used as a air-conduction type space heater. the burner will be mounted vertically at the bottom of an open bottomed 100 pound propane tank with a 6 inch flue pipe out the top. there will also be a couple of hot air deflection plates placed above the fire but before the flue exit, this tank will simply set loosly on the horizontal flat plate base that the burner is mounted in. This allows the tank to be easily lifted off the base for cleaning out the combustion chamber.

Doing rough BTU calculations for the one pint of preheated oil I should only need a couple hundred watts or less to maintain the 160 degree temp for used motor oil. For testing I will use a veriac to set the voltage applied to the heater element at some lower-than-110-volt level at a 100% duty cycle, hopefully this will keep the surface temp of the element below the "clumping" temp. If this works I will build a SCR phaze switching power controller that will operate the heater in a reduced duty cycle low-power approach by switching the 110 volt applied voltage on/off 120 times/sec to keep the voltage applied to the heating element from actually reaches it's full 110 volt extremes and thus never allow the heater to reach any maximum possible full temp.

One of the local auto repair garages here in town uses a commercial waste oil burner that has a 1.4 G/H rating, it is used to heat a poorly insulated brick 5-bay garage with one bay being a high-bay, it only burns 100% of the time if the temps are down around "0" deg f continuously.
I looked through the manual for it and the burner is also of the basic becket style burner modified with a syphon-style atomizing nozzle. They added a 4 X 6 X 1 inch block of aluminum just prior to the burner assembly, there is a standard 400 watt cartridge heater placed in a hole across the 4 inch dimension of this block at it's center, the syphon air passes through another 4 inch long hole in one end of the block and the fuel goes through another 4 inch long hole at the other end of the block, The syphon air for this furnace is supplied by the normal shop air compressor through a pressure regulator set to about 6 pounds pressure. This furnace has been working fine for the last 4 winters burning there oil-change oil.

The flue output from this furnace has a cool-air damper at the bottom of the stack that goes up through the roof, this is there to allow cooling air into the upright flue to cool the exhaust before it actually goes through the roof but it also allows anything being blown out of the combustion chamber to drop out of the bottom of the flue pipe. After a couple days burning the floor under this partally open damper gets covered with a layer of small wierd 1/16 inch to 3/8 inch diameter mostly round balls that are sort of rubbery-oily chunks, these Look like fairly dry balls of oily dirt. He only bothers to clean the combustion chamber out once a year.

veg cleaning up things after UEO -- I see this with the bowl burner also, I think the veg simply burns at a high enough temp to burn all the oily soot off everything.

Tim,
My pre-heater will heat up to temperature in about 60 seconds or less. In 90 seconds, I will hear the oil boiling if using WMO.

Its actually about 3 times larger than what is required.

Not sure if I mentioned this earlier but I am also using a 100lb propane tank as my combustion chamber. I have a door built into the side of it for cleaning.

Its funny you mention the stuff falling out of the stack.. every now and then I can hear something in there.. Sounds like someone dropping a pin down from the roof..only its going the other way..

Murphy, great looking system! Very well thought out. Any thoughts to selling building plans and material lists? I would be interested.

quote:

Originally posted by mispecial:
Murphy, great looking system! Very well thought out. Any thoughts to selling building plans and material lists? I would be interested.

That's exactly what I am planning on doing.. I'll be selling both completed units and just the plans/drawings for them.

Completed unit is $2500 (although I'm re-considering that price)

Not sure how to price the plans..

I'm not ready to offer it up yet.. I'm still working out a few bugs.. I want to make sure when I advertise its features, I'm not stretching any truths.

Any suggestions on the price for the plans? There are quite a few parts that have to be made for it.. I was thinking about how I would offer the drawings, and instructions and what I would have to do to make them readable by the average person.. There are a few specialty parts that I thought I might include in the package also..

Being able to purchase those specialty parts from you would certianly make things easier. That way they are exactly what you intended and trying to find someone to make the parts and explan what you need is time consuming. The more detailed the instructions, the better. I would not be too bashful on the price of the plans, you did all of the thinking. And there will questions about the assembly which will take up your time. I'll be follow ing this thread.--Matt

I also would be interested in the plans and like Matt would highly consider buying the specialized parts off you since my shop area is a garage and hand tools at this point. I do hope to get a mig welder next month since I was almost a good boy this year, lol. Lathe and milling machine only a dream, but I am almost up on processor and working towards a listeroid genset by summer, need the a/c badly here in Las Vegas. Thanks Dan. email me if you get together with a price for plans and parts. connollydj@cox.net