Great news Rumen and thanks for the offer; Ok; for starters, and with regard to reducing the wash cycles here is what I learned last night. Two hours after the first wash was turned off, I drained one liter of wash water ( I use 4 liters to wash) and set the beaker aside overnight. My thought was that the water still probably contains lots of tiny droplets of biodiesel and draining it too early will waste fuel and add biodiesel to the waste stream. This only really counts on the first wash because I reuse my second and third water, but how long to wait?? So in the morning I checked to see how much biodiesel had collected on top of the water. I would estimate it was less than 1 ml. I think this would indicate, at least with my setup that the first two washes could be done in as little as four and one half hours. The final wash should be well settled to reduce drying time but with vacuum drying it is so much shorter than natural air drying that a little extra water content won't make a huge difference if you have a vacuum pump with decent throughput. I am using an Edwards 18 which according to the charts should give me about 3 liters per second at 28" Hg vacuum. It has seen it's days so perhaps it is only doing 1 liter per second. BTW I am using SVO (rapeseed oil) as the pump oil, works great! Coincidentally it also takes about 2 hours to warm the contents of my reactor from 18 C to 50 C so perhaps I could re-warm the reactor while the final wash is settling, and then see how long it takes to dry after that. On the other question about traces of glycerin, due to small plumbing details I am still not happy with (and will soon fix) I know I had some traces of glycerin left before the first wash. It is difficult to estimate but I could guess it is a few cc's probably less than 5. I have a 25 liter batch size so this is like 200 ppm glycerin worst case. This did not affect the first wash significantly. but I let the batch settle overnight and cool. I would really like to know what would happen if I washed after only settling for a few hours. Another thing I am curious about is whether or not it is better to keep the reactor warm throughout the entire process, which wouldn't cost much in electricity if the cycle time is around 24 hours. I don't know if this is possible though. What is the opinion of the greybeards on the list? What type of washing are you doing Rumen? I am pump washing and I find now I can be rather aggressive with it as long as I get a good complete reaction. Problems with the wash in early batches turned out to be poor or incomplete reactions. Now that I am using my little titrator I think I am more accurate. Hand agitated titrations always resulted in oil settling out in the bottom of the test tube and I don't think I was getting good accuracy. Now everything is so well agitated that I don't see oil dropping out of the titration and my washes are very easy now. :) Let's see what we can find out about minimizing settling times on the wash process first and then we can tackle the settling time for the reaction. Rumen, how often do you make a batch? I can do one every few days....I think my biggest obstacle is time spent in the pub....lol....but hey I have to show my gratitude for the oil right?....2xLOL BTW I'm working on a BOM for my reactor which will be an excel spreadsheet with links to data sheets where applicable for parts. I'll eventually see if I can draw up an auto cad drawing for the frame etc. and get it all up on my site, in case anyone is interested.
Cheers Joe Rumen Slavov wrote: Snip > I will fully support the idea to co-experimenting >and sharing the results-just tell me what I can do to >help! > Good luck to everyone! > Rumen > > _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
