Waste Vegetable Oil Fuels

A few weeks ago I finally broke down and bought some diesel. I had a sluggish moment that I thought might have been the filter clogging. It passed, but got me worried enough that I got some petrol diesel. Here is a graphic I stole off of the NOAA site. It shows the temperatures, in Fahrenheit, that I’ve been dealing with here in Salt Lake City. For those of you who don’t know, biodiesel will freeze at a much higher temperature than petrol diesel. This table that I screen captured from the University of Missouri shows the different “cloud points” of common oils and the esters (biodiesels) of those oils compared to petrol diesel. Check out the full article!

I have heard that running certain mixtures of petrol diesel with biodiesel will allow you to run in colder temperatures, but I don’t like the idea of using petrol diesel. I have also heard that some biodieselers are using kerosene to cut their brew to help the cold weather problems. Either way it’s still oil stock. I had some left over kerosene that I bought to refill a heater that I borrowed, so I thought I’d run an experiment. I went down to my local truck stop and bought the anti-gel additives that they had for sale: Power Sevrice and Diesel Treat. I took some biodiesel that I had brewed and put it in 4 Ball® Mason Jars. I put 1500 ml in to 3 of them and 1200ml in the other. I left one as the control with pure biodiesel. The one with 1200 ml of biodiesel I added 300 ml of Klean-Heat kerosene. The other two got a respective dose of their additive as directed. I also bought a digital thermometer at Harbor Freight for a good visual of the current temperature.

I left the 4 jars out overnight to see what would happen. That night it got down below freezing. The city wide low temperature according to the NOAA was 19 F, and as I took the picture the next morning at about 10 AM it was about 29 F. We are a bit higher in elevation and at the mouth of a canyon so I would imagine that we are a bit colder than the NOAA value. Later that day at 5:30 PM I took another picture. According to NOAA the high that day for the city was 38 F. I was busy on the 14th and only looked at my various biodiesel-cicles. The samples were all bricks that night, even with a high of 32 F that day. It was cold last night: NOAA tells of 17 F. My thermometer was at 15 F even at 9:00 AM. All the samples turned completely solid. There is even some expansion in the crystal formations in some of the samples.

Unfortunately my only analytical method is that of ocular sensitivity. So I’ll pass on the results.

On December 13th at 10:00 AM

On December 13th at 5:30 PM

On December 15th at 9:00 AM

My conclusions for now are:

• Kerosene works, but not well enough at 20%. Maybe at a higher % or with some Power Service.
• Power Service has some potential, but needs greater concentration.
• Diesel Treat didn’t show much difference than B100, but I’ll try higher concentrations.
• B100 freezes!

My plan is to now work on the some petrol diesel combos as well as continuing on with these pet projects. Look for more on this fun and engaging science project. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests.

For more reading check out this cold flow article at the National Biodiesel Board.

December 18th 2005:
Since the original post I have found two other similar posts:
Piedmont Biofuels: B100 Winterization
BiodieselNow: Winterizing and Anti-Gel Re-Visited