Biodiesel

So what is biodiesel and how does it work? Simply, biodiesel is a organic replacement for regular diesel fuel. Biodiesel can be produced from vegetable oils and animal fats. The best biodiesel is made from Canola oil and Rape seed oil. These oils have the best cold weather properties and are most easily manipulated to operate in arctic cold. There is a large amount of misinformation readily available regarding biodiesel so we would like to take this opportunity to state some facts about the fuel which are supported by  comprehensive test reults. Below we have listed the most common fallacies linked to biodiesel.

Will biodiesel damage my engine?

When  approved to european standards, biodiesel will not harm any diesel engine. Biodiesel has had some problems in the U.S.A primarily due to subtle differences in the standards set out by the American A.S.T.M  and European EN standards.

Lets be clear on  the basics, both standards require that the biodiesel has only minute levels of residual glycerine, water, alcohol and catalyst. Any of these 4 things can cause engine damage in high enough concentration. The subtle difference occurs in temperature standards. The European EN standard is very specific about what temperatures the fuel must operate at to satisfy the standard. The A.S.T.M standard only requires that the producer informs the end user as to what temperature their biodiesel will operate in.

This little fact has caused the bulk of horror stories about biodiesel. For example, European winter biodiesel must operate at -20C. This means that the fuel is almost certainly produced from rape seed or canola seed. These are the two most common oils that have cold weather properties to meet the standard. In the U.S.A biodiesel is predominately produced from soy bean oil. Soy bean based biodiesel will generally operate to ~0C. This obviously is not cold enough for Northern states and Canada. The solution to this so far has been to only allow a small percentage blend of biodiesel in petrodiesel. The problem here is that once biodiesel has reached its cloud point in cold weather, crystals begin to aggregate within the biodiesel which,as they grow, become sufficiently large enough to plug a fuel filter. This is called the Cold Filter Plug Point (CFPP). So if you blend biodiesel at 5% that 5% of your fuel still begins to cloud and crystalize in cold weather. Even though it is only 5%, once the fuel temperature is cold enough the biodiesel will fully crystallize. This means that 5% of your fuel tank is now a solid floating is diesel fuel. Even though it takes a while, these crystals cannot flow through the fuel filter. If the fuel remains cold enough they continue to get trapped in the filter plugging it and starving the engine of fuel. This has happened and created some bad publicity.

The truth is, starving your diesel engine has the potential to cause damage to the fuel system. Don’t blame the biodiesel if this happens to you, blame the person who filled your tank with unsuitable biodiesel.

We have always advocated that Canada adopt the European EN standard for our biodiesel. It would ensure that our fuel is suited to our climate, that warm climate fuel could not be imported and that we will not suffer the same horror stories experienced by our southern neighbors.

Will I loose power using biodiesel?

In the summer of 2006 we were invited to have our biodiesel tested by Assiniboine Community College. The college operates a modern engine dynometer and emissions testing package. One of the instructors, Dietrich Schellenberg, headed up the project and gave us the fuel requirements for the test . The engine installed on the dynometer is a N14 Cummins diesel. This is a common semi truck engine.

The basic test was a direct comparison of regular diesel versus biodiesel. The Cummins was warmed up to operating conditions then run through a standard series of load and emissions tests running on regular diesel. The fuel system was then flushed with biodiesel and the test was repeated using 100% biodiesel. The results were correlated and recorded on graphs to demonstrate the differences in the fuel.

Please click here to view a power point presentation of test results.

Biodiesel Processing

We have been developing biodiesel process equipment for several years and have been involved in several biodiesel pilot projects. We have now constructed some medium scale biodiesel processors and hope to have a standardized configuration ready in late 2009.

Biogas Combustion

We have been developing systems to combust low thermal value gases in large slow speed diesels in a dual fuel configuration. There has been a lot of development work completed in Manitoba  by several different groups trying to successfully gasify organic wastes such as wood chip, switch grass, crop residue and coal.

Some of the gasifiers have been quite successful and produced good quality gas that is clean but of a low thermal value. Most groups have chosen to burn this gas cleanly in boilers for steam or hot water. We feel that this is an inefficient way to utilize this green fuel. There is so much more energy to be recovered rather than using a 30% efficient boiler and wasting heat to the environment.

We have developed systems to burn these gasses in large diesels. This produces a quantum leap in efficient use of the fuel gas. The diesels are typically 40% efficient which means that 40% of the energy produced from the gas goes directly to shaft power. That shaft power can generate electricity which is much more useful than heat alone. The best part is that the waste heat exiting the engines exhaust can then be captured in an exhaust gas boiler and recovered as steam or hot water. Normally 30-40% of the fuel energy can be recovered from the exhaust resulting on only 20-30% being lost to atmosphere as opposed to 70% being lost in a boiler only configuration..

The reason that we use diesels is for stability. Electricity producers want stable electricity at 60Hz that doesn't fluctuate with load changes. Trying to run pure gas with a low energy content makes for a very unstable engine with poor response to load changes. The system we developed allows a large diesel to run on up to 96% gas and 4% diesel fuel. When a large load demand is placed on the generator the digital control allows the diesel to catch the load rapidly with diesel fuel then increase the gas supply as quickly as possible to its new equilibrium. The advantage of this system is that steady power output can be guaranteed while burning the highest possible fraction of fuel gas.

We have worked extensively with  a local Manitoba company, Waste 2 Energy (W2E), on a large scale test of the system. W2E produce a successful gassifier design which we coupled to our test engine at their development site. The engine was run through several tests successfully which allowed us to monitor the engine carefully and asses its running characteristics. During the last test the generator successfully powered the entire gasification system and produced 120Kw excess power which was fed into a load bank. The system ran on 96% wood chips and 4% biodiesel.

Please click HERE to see a clip on the test engine under load.

Please click the icon to see a clip of a pre-shipment run.