How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[Marso Green]

Thnx Beyond Biodiesel and Marso Green,
I passed the gases thru 2nd scrubber and bubbler. If any remaining gas was charged thru the burner and burned out. Yppe no smell at all.

That is great news Pravin!!! Now that you know how to eliminate the smell, you can focus on capturing more fuel rather than waste it in the scrubber and bubbler. I suggest introducing a second condenser in series with the first one. That may not be simple to implement immediately, but it can be a longer term goal

Best of luck and keep us posted on your progress!!!

[Beyond Biodiesel]

condenser designs

My first design had just a 6 foot (2m) long tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser, where I collected kerosene, but I smelled a lot of oil vapor coming out the exhaust, so I added an 8 foot (3m) I got no more condensate at the bottom of that 2nd tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser, so I added a 20 foot (6m) coil in a bucket of ice, and now I get gasoline at the bottom of that condenser, and no more oil vapors come out the exhaust. I also found all I needed was a 2foot (1m) long tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser.

[Marso Green]

My first design had just a 6 foot (2m) long tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser, where I collected kerosene, but I smelled a lot of oil vapor coming out the exhaust, so I added an 8 foot (3m) I got no more condensate at the bottom of that 2nd tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser, so I added a 20 foot (6m) coil in a bucket of ice, and now I get gasoline at the bottom of that condenser, and no more oil vapors come out the exhaust. I also found all I needed was a 2foot (1m) long tube-in-tube water-cooled condenser.

BBD, thanks for sharing, but these are all absolute dimensions and numbers that need to be related to the size of your reactor, and the feedstock used....just for everyone else's education :-)

[Beyond Biodiesel]

BBD, thanks for sharing, but these are all absolute dimensions and numbers that need to be related to the size of your reactor, and the feedstock used....just for everyone else's education :-)

I agree, I am currently working on distilling WMO, because I have access to more WMO than I can manage to turn into fuel. So, my reactor/retort is only 6 gallons (22.7L). I also do not blast watts into my retort, instead I want control, so I am using only 1500 watts for now.

The big problem I have had is, I was just dumping all of the watts into the bottom of the retort. I am planning on spreading the watts out more evenly all over the retort. When the upgrade is completed, and I have run it successfully, then I will report back, but it should work well.

Heating just the bottom of the retort when I was just distilling off light fractions from contaminated solvents up to 400F (200c) worked fine, but as the terminal Temp has gone up from ambient, the greater the delta T across the device has become to the point that I get boiling, but little distillate is coming out, because it is just refluxing off the cooler lid.

Knowing how long the run is for others would help. Lately my runs with 6 gallons (22.7L) of WMO have been 7 hours from the time I turned on the heat to the time I turned it off.

[Marso Green]

The process is extreme easy to convert plastic in to diesel fuel. If you heat plastic waste in non oxygen environment, it will melt, but will not burn. After it has melted, it will start to boil and evaporate, you just need to put those vapors through a cooling pipe and when cooled the vapors will condense to a liquid and some of the vapors with shorter hydrocarbon lengths will remain as a gas. The exit of the cooling pipe is then going through a bubbler containing water to capture the last liquid forms of fuel and leave only gas that is then burned. If the cooling of the cooling tube is sufficient, there will be no fuel in the bubbler, but if not, the water will grip all the remaining fuel that will float above the water and can be poured off the water. On the bottom of the cooling tube is a steel reservoir that collects all the liquid and it has a release valve on the bottom so that the liquid fuel can be poured out. So anyone is able to do this because of its easier procedure.


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wealth from waste plastic

There are 65+ pages in this thread dedicated to explaining just that - pyrolysis of plastics - but thank you for the summary. Care to tell us if you're speaking of first hand experience or academic knowledge?

Thank you

[AetherScientist]

There are 65+ pages in this thread dedicated to explaining just that - pyrolysis of plastics.
Thank you

that's awesome. But my question is... Has anyone in this thread made it? I've seen the technique of Akinori Ito (or similar name) is extremely simple to do. But I'm not going to read 65+ pages only to check if someone here has did it.

[Marso Green]

that's awesome. But my question is... Has anyone in this thread made it? I've seen the technique of Akinori Ito (or similar name) is extremely simple to do. But I'm not going to read 65+ pages only to check if someone here has did it.

I'm not sure if your comments are directed at me or the previous poster who made statements about how "simple" this is.

The answer is in the opening of the thread on the very first page, and it is yes, but not as simplistically as implied by Ksushi or yourself . You can equally describe the principle of operation of an internal combustion engine, but can't call it "simple". Same for plastic pyrolysis to liquid fuel. There are many ways to achieve temperature control and fluid management. We're not reinventing the wheel here, just educating the public on available hardware and processes that can be achieved by ambitious backyard tinkerers, using a variety of feedstock.

if you read through this thread, you'll spare everyone yet another regurgitation (and less additional/redundant pages) of the same thing to a newbie who demands to have their questions answered but are not willing to read. And it doesn't stop there. After the initial inquiry is answered, new follow-up questions come up, all of which had been answered to nauseum in the earlier pages anyway. Questions are encouraged of course, but not attitudes that are openly against reading....on their first post nonetheless.


I'm sorry but if you don't want to bother with reading what many put so much effort in writing for the benefit of people like you, why do you expect the same people to bother themselves and give you special attention?

[Jetijs]

Marso Green, I like you!

[batwicho]

about reflux

I didn't found drawing or description of the interior of the column reflux and the ratio with reactor. Can anyone help?

[DrGoldSmith]

Finally! I read it all!!!

This has been quite a read with a lot of good info, some drama and a bit of ignorant contradicting arrogance (from one member that I don't need to mention...

Jetijs, much respect... Nice job, wise approach to both the project and the students.

I began working on plastic to fuel about two months ago completely blind, just on a hunch and some faint recollection of pyrolysis. As a result I took a completely different approach that I'm sure you all may find helpful.

I have much to share but it's late and I have been trading sleep for reading time for the last two weeks and it's starting to catch up with me. Tomorrow I will post some pic, share my journey and ask some questions (and I promise they won't be ones that I can find the answers to in the past 66 pages... unless I missed something because I was dozing off)

Thanks to all the clever,
The persistent,
And the dreamers it took,
I admire and appreciate your work and contributions to this endeavor.

SY

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Welcome SY, I look forward to reading your contributions to this thread.

[mjohnson1]

Has anyone managed to get their hands on some zeolite catalyst?

Here's a picture of a chart from a book which shows the conversion of polyolefins to fuels. If we could all get a group buy going or if someone knows of a reliable supplier of zeolite catalyst I would like to experiment with it.

[DrGoldSmith]

Here is a little more about my journey-

I have a lot of waste plastic that i have to pay to get rid of and was looking for answers. Over the summer i bumped into a friend that told me he got a new job managing a plastic recycling facility. One question led to another and by the time we finished our discussion i was eager to setup a meeting to see the facility. I learned quite a bit and this tour of his plant opened my eyes to something i really didn't think much about in the past and that is that plastic has value and that recycling plastic is quickly becoming big business.

One question led to another again and before long i came to realize that my initial conclusions were incorrect. I came to find out that plastic for recycling only has value IF it is clean, sorted and ground. The value for the buyers is only there if the recycled plastic is uncontaminated and can be dumped into the same bin as new plastic to produce the same end product that they are using it for... so much as a printed sell by date on a milk carton is the difference between $.80 a pound and $.02 a pound.

As i walk the plant there was a phrase that kept coming up- "that's contaminated so it goes in the export container". for every bin of good sell-able 'clean' plastic there seemed to be two bins of contaminated "export".

Well what does that mean "export" anyway?

He went on to tell me that they sell the contaminated plastic to China all mixed together. even with contaminates, dirt, wood, paper... all of the 'junk' they sweep from the floor, everything goes in the shipping containers that lined the parking lot. hmmm....???

To make it even more interesting he told me that they actually lose about $20 a ton when they export it but that that is still good because its $20 cheaper than having to pay the dump to take it for $40 a ton.

So let me get this straight... you sell it to China... at a loss...
what do they do with it???

No one really knew, a lot of guesses and crazy ideas but no solid answers.


Well i thought about this for months and finally started to look into it. With quite a bit of effort i chased the answer thru a number of recycling companies until i talked with an owner of a little shop (btw, these places are popping up like crazy, seems that plastic is the new scrap metal, only you need bigger trucks to scrap for it... i mean collect it) He said something that finally made it make sense "plastic is made of oil and the Chinese are stockpiling it like crazy to turn it back to oil!"


!!! I was now on a mission !!!

Normally i would research the heck out of the idea and then work on it, but for some reason something clicked and instead i immediately setup a crude test and tried a few things completely blind of all of the progress that people have already made in this field.

I did my testing based on something i vaguely remembered about pyrolsys----This is the important part that i think you all can appreciate and perhaps utilize- I used a simple lab setup... Glass!, quick, simple, see thru, and very informative!

I was able to run some simple experiments and quickly produced fuel!
It was amazing to see that heating plastic in a boiling flask in a vacuum and running the gas thru a kjeldahl bulb (another important point) and then thru a condenser easily produced fuel... and quickly i learned that by simply changing the collection flask as the boiling points were hit (I could see the temp drop then rise as the fractions cracked and boiled away) i could get the various fractions separated.

After spending about a week playing, learning and simply applying basic chemistry i was quite satisfied that i could upscale this to a large scale device... and that's when i sat down and started to research this and soon bumped into this great forum.

I think it took longer to read this all than it did to do the experiments...
and i pained at the trials and tribulations that some of you have encountered... I wanted so badly to post "hey, try this in a small scale glass setup!" so that everyone can see what is happening. Simply seeing what is going on can make this so much easier to learn and understand. My issue was that i was still two years behind most of you in the thread so i couldn't post until i caught up (and I sat on the edge of my seat to see how it turned out!). I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to not know what is going on inside your devices... and i hope you all can appreciate what i hope to contribute...

I wish i had more time to get all the info, pics, videos and data posted... but i plan to do this in the coming days and weeks for the good of all that journeys down this same road!

ps, sorry for the long post but there is just so much to share for me to make it all make sense.


SY

[Beyond Biodiesel]

That was a great post Sy, and a great read. I have distilled crude oil in glassware. It is very instructive to do so, so i was glad to see someone here do that.

Do keep in mind that there are some very toxic by products of pyrolysis that can come from halogenated hydrocarbons, so one will want to avoid those sources, such as: PVC, PTFE, etc.

[pravin]

beyond bio. i have huge waste of recycled pet & polyester film ( used sun control film 4 auto ). Is it possible to proces them safely commercialy. pls reply.