Day 4 - Biofuels (Biodiesel)

Today was all about the topic that brought me to the BBEP program, biodiesel.  Inside and outside of the classroom I have been working to integrate biodiesel and the underlying chemistry/engineering into my research.  Today I had the opportunity to present my work before the group.  However, I was the second presenter, behind Mingxin Guo from Delaware State University.

Mingxin is an assistant professor at Delaware State University's Department of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, specializing in soil science.  Mingxin presented the research complexities of producing biodiesel and the chemical challenges behind the technology available to produce biodiesel.

Rudolph Diesel, the pioneer and namesake of the diesel engine, originally designed the engine to run on vegetable oil.  Oils, or lipids, are essentially a glycerol backbone with three long-chain fatty acids that uniformly branch off.  Vegetable oil, by itself, is capable of running a diesel engine, provided that the conditions are perfect: warm day (vegetable oil's viscosity is a limiting factor in it's ability to run an engine), infrastructure (dual fuel system is required so the engine can be started on petrodiesel and then switched to vegetable oil).  Biodiesel, on the other hand, is a low viscosity product that can be run in any diesel engine without modification.  The question is how and why?  Through the chemical process of transesterification, the complex lipid molecule is broken into it's four components, a glycerol and three fatty acids (FA), and each FA is then modified so that a methanol molecule is added to make it combustable and of lower viscosity.

Lab exercise producing biodiesel

The beauty of biodiesel is that it can be produced simply from a waste product that would otherwise be useless.  I was able to present my topic, Biodiesel in the Classroom, and specifically what is being done at University School.  Check out the powerpoint from the link above.

In the afternoon we began a lab that would take pure vegetable oil and convert it to biodiesel.  While much more technical and focused on a quality product than the average DIY type processor, the activity was valuable.  In part, this was due to a secondary part of the lab where we titrated pure, unused vegetable oil as well as waste vegetable oil collected from a fryer.  The titration is used to determine how much catalyst we would need as a function of the free fatty acids (FFA) created during the thermal breakdown in a frying application.

We will finish this lab on Saturday by using a separatory funnel to separate the glycerin and biodiesel, and then used again during the washing phase.  Pictures to follow.

Lastly, this afternoon we traveled to Homer, NY to the farm of Mr. Hugh Reihlman, a self proclaimed "gear head" who makes his own biodiesel with a commercially purchased processor.  He walked us through the process he uses and showed us his setup.

Mr. Reihlman describing his biodiesel setup

He did say that he has been having difficulty finding waste vegetable oil (WVO) due to the demand from several biodiesel processors in the region.  They purchase the WVO from the restaurants and thus he can't compete.  However, he is able to produce biodiesel at a rate of around $1.00 a gallon, instead of purchasing it from the local service station for over $4.00 a gallon.

The entire CMTT group from Cornell