How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[Jetijs]

Thank you very much for sharing this information Jetijs. I was just wondering...would the first setup be better beacause you have no liquid waxes to deal with?

What do you mean with the first setup? Which first setup?
I am now prepearing for spring cleaning, there is a lots of wood waste here now, so I have dug up my oldest setup that was used for getting fuel from tires. It uses wood that is burned beneath the reactor. Will celan up the neighbourghood and get some diesel in the process. I will make some pictures and maybe a video about that somewhere in next week.

[Jetijs]

BTW, I already posted this on Efficient Carburetor designs thread, thought I repost it here since it is relevant to this thread as well. So if everything really works as I think it should, eveyone should be able to drive their car on 200 miles per gallon with a moderatelly easy modification of their cars. And since they then used so small fuel ammounts, they could easy produce that ammount themselves using the tech described in this topic with a unit the size of a microwave

Hello.
Based of what I know on thermal depolymerisation of hydrocarbon chains, I believe I know now how to build a 200 miles per gallon fuel system. In my experience with hho, ioonizers and plasma plugs, I am certain now, that they do not add extra energy in the engine, they just help to use the fuel to its full potential, just like catalysts. Gasoline and diesel have much more power in them than a typical engine uses and much of the fuel is just wasted. I am now convinced that it should be fairly easy to get the most out of hydrocarbon fuels reaching mileages up to 200 miles per gallon. In my country it is popular to convert car engines to run on propane or butane, because it is a bit cheaper than liquid fuels. I have some friends who did that and they also tried hho, on their engines, but none of the gas systems showed any gain, why? We will come to that. Also we are the closest EU country to Russia so we have experience with Russian and European fuels. Russian standards are way lower than those of EU. Most of the people who have tried both, report a better mileage with EU fuels than when Russian fuels are used. For example, my friend got 100km per 7 liters of EU fuel, and he needed 8 liters of Russian fuel to get the same distance. This is important.
This shows that although both fuels are hydrocarbon based, there is a major difference between them and the difference is the volume of light fractions in the fuel. The EU fuel has more of them per volume than the Russian fuel. But nevertheless even EU fuel is not so good considering how much mileage you get and how much you could get if you used it fully. So now lets move on. What are hydrocarbon chains? Most of you already know that. If you have very long chains, then you get polymers, like polyethylene and polypropylene, chop those chains shorter and you will get oils, tars, waxes. Chop those chains smaller, you will get diesel, chop the diesel hydrocarbon chains and you will get gasoline. Chop those chains even smaller and you will get propane and butane. This can easily be done with heat, like what we do on the "fuel from waste plastics" thread. So if the modern fuels have much long hydrocarbon chains in it, it makes sense to chop them smaller, preferably to the propane and butane range as that is a gas and not liquid and would not need to be turned into vapor or mist when mixed with air as that process is not the most efficient. If you have fuel gas, you will get the best possible gas/air mixture quality and get most of the fuel out. This is why no gains are seen when hho is used on propane/butane fueled cars. The gas systems on cars are rather cheap and easy to install, but the major disadvantage is that you need pressure vessels to store the propane and butane, they have limited volume and take up a lot of space. So you get less miles per refill. If we used a system that uses liquid hydrocarbons and crack them into propane and butane on the fly, we would get most of the fuel out and store way more of the fuel in the tank in liquid form, so you could get some 3-5 times further with one full tank. The cracking process just needs heat and there is more than enough heat produced in the engine, it is just a matter of delivering it where it is needed. Just warming the fuel won't work well, you need to heat it to the thermal cracking point. I believe this is how the Pogue carburetor works. I would propose the following design, take a metal container with fuel, heat it up to the cracking temperature, let the vapors through some long copper pipe coils in a cone shape or any other shape that would allow the cooled and condensed fuel to flow back into the heat chamber. The output from the condenser coils would that go through a small compressor and into a storage buffer tank. The pressurized gas would then be delivered to the engine intake.
Such a system should be able to run on all sorts of different fuels, liquid and even solid, like plastics. As long as there are hydrocarbons in there. It could run on waste oil, tars, ever animal fats.
Till recent I did not know about thermal cracking and thermal depolymerisation and I thought that only heating the fuel to some 200 degrees would be enough. No wonder that when I tried that, the vapors turned back into liquid very fast when cooled - the temperature was way too low.
What do you think about this?

[boywonder]

What do you mean with the first setup? Which first setup?
I am now prepearing for spring cleaning, there is a lots of wood waste here now, so I have dug up my oldest setup that was used for getting fuel from tires. It uses wood that is burned beneath the reactor. Will celan up the neighbourghood and get some diesel in the process. I will make some pictures and maybe a video about that somewhere in next week.

Jetijs..i mean the initial setup of the reactor on this thread, or this video...
YouTube - Easy way to make your own diesel from plastic waste

With that setup you dont seem to be getting any liquid waxes that need further proccessing..am i correct?

Thanks, John.

[Jetijs]

John, that is the only setup so far I have used, it is not about setup, it is about plastic type. Polyethylene will make waxes on the first run, polypropylene will not. In order to get polyethylene into pure liquid form, you need to put it through the process another time, or maybe use higher temperatures in the first run, but I have not tested that yet. Anyway, those waxes can also be used as fuel if you have a heated fuel tank, because they turn liquid already at 30 degree celsius and behave then as usual diesel.

[dutchdivco]

Jetsis

Sorry if i contributed at all to the distraction on the other thread. Anyway, this is a very promising idea; to store fuel as a liquid, load into vehicls as liquid, and only convert to gaseous methane/hydrogen as needed definetly the way to go. This is what I have been working towards.Only I have been pursuing catalictic cracking, by palladium plating the pistons and valves, as opposed to the thermal cracking you are working on.Your way does eliminate several potential problems with catalyctic cracking.
My thinking is if you could make the process 'on demand' as much as possible; so that your not compressing/storing any of the gaseous fuel, only making it as you need it; that would be the ideal.Just throwing that out there, 'for what its worth'. Jim

[Jetijs]

Hi Jim
I did not consider your post a distraction at all. they are all relevant. It is just that palladium is so damn expensive and plating combustion chamber internals with it is very hard and expensive that I don't consider it a practical way to get what I want. Thermal degradation or depolymerisation works well just as is. Maybe there are some cheaper catalysts? I read the patent 4045370 where the inventor claims, that chromium, molybdenum and tungsten oxides are good catalysts. All of them are expensive except chromium oxide, maybe it is worth a try?

[dutchdivco]

I bought 2 books of palladium leaf

for $50.00 each, if i recall. Its 99% pure.Each leaf is 2 1/8" square, and there are 25 leaves per book. Very thin. I thought i would suspend the pistons upside down in a solution, attached to a lead. Push a thumbtack thru the book of leaf, with the other lead attached to it, and lower it down into the solution.Anyway, got the leaf, but never actually did anything with it.
Assuming it worked, (the plating) there are still challenges to catalyctically cracking the fuel in the cylinder.The main advantage, as I see it would be that it would be 'on-demand' cracking; the fuel would be a liquid all the way into the cylinder, and only on the combustion stroke would it be cracked/converted.Unless it reached a temp of 1000 degrees during the compression stroke, in which case everything would go BLEWIE!!Maybe if the engine overheated?
Am interested in your approach, of thermally cracking, which I hadn't really picked up on, before.What temp do you figure you need, in order to turn fuels into methane/hydrogen? Jim

[wrtner]

Assuming it worked, (the plating) there are still challenges to catalyctically cracking the fuel in the cylinder.

One issue will be the time taken by the catalytical cracking process.

I can't imagine that it can happen in "real time".

[dutchdivco]

Actually, no

At least, not from my understanding. It happens very fast. My concern was that, as I understand it, in A) the presence of oxygen, and B) when heated to at least 1000 degrees F., any petroleum product will be 'cracked' into hydrogen and methane, and ignited, without any ignition source being necessary.My concern was that during compression, maybe on an 'overheated' engine, that the temp in the cylinder might get to 1000 degrees F. during the end of the compression cycle, and ignite before I want it to.Had difficulty googling to find out what temp gets to during compression.
Since I am not in a position to proceed further with this, I kind of left it there.
Jim

[Jetijs]

Had a little fun today.
I used my old tire recycler setup, filled it with shredded HDPE and fired it up. It was also insulated from the outside with fiber insulation. After a hour or so, gas started to appear from the output pipe of the radiator. Some minutes later first fuel started to condense in the condenser. Unfortunatelly the lid gasket failed and some fuel started to uzze out, that is when I put out the fire that heated it all. The liquid fuel soaked into the insulation, I tried to remove it and it went up in flames as the fuel and the insulation was very hot - around 200 degree celsius. It just got the needed air and combusted. All the lid area went up in flames. That was a show Anyway, I put that fire out without problems. This just gets to show that you must be careful, the lid needs to be very thight and hermetic, othervise you have a problem. Will replace the gasket and try again tomorrow. But judging from the results while the setup was running, the heating using oprn flame is much better and faster than electricity, all that volume heated up very fast and the liquid fuel came out in large quantities, almost like water from tap

[Jetijs]

Here was te setup:

[dutchdivco]

lots learned

Great lessons for us all; always keep fire extinguisher handy, and have set-up out away from buildings and flamables.And, interesting that wood fire worked so well. Might be more economical, even if you had to buy the fire wood, compared with buying the electricity.What kind of radiator is that you used, for the condenser? Is it A/c? Jim

[noonya]

Here was te setup:

Dear Jetijs


Thanks for this thread. Can you please give more details your wood burner configuration, like you did with the electric-powered reactor. I live in Africa where wood plus charcoal are easier to get than electricity. I was planning to use waste motor oil as fuel as well as feedstock. My intended waste oil burner is here moya034's waste oil and propane burner in a furnace like this "2 bucks" crucible furnace.

I think since such a setup is meant for melting metal it will not be helpful. What do you think? And how do you monitor and regular the temperature on a wood burner?

Noonya

[sampa133gr]

hello from greece . thanks everyone who work on this project. i just want to see more pictures of the last experiment if it is possible and more specs of it... thanks again

[Jetijs]

Hi guys, there is not much to tell really about this setup. The specs wont help you as they are not critical. Just use what you have available. This current setup just uses a small metal container with a capacity of 50L that is welded into a bigger metal cylinder. The wood is burned insede the bigger metal cylinder just beneath the smaller one and the heat from the wood flames and hot gasses travels between the small metal container and the bigger outer cylinder up into chimny. The most important part is the lid of the metal container that is heated. The lid must be air thight and must be able to handle temperatures up to 600 degree celsius. There are not many seals that can handle this, that is why a conical groove in the lid and the flange is the best solution. The plastic vapor temperature rises slowly and this enables you to monitor and adust the temperature easily by trowind more wood in the burner or decreasing the air flow into the burner.

I am now working wih my frien on another concept. We want to use the heat only where it is needed and make the device as compact as possible, so this is what we came up with so far:


You have a feeder system much like those in plastic extruders. It uses a wooden spiral drill bit inside a metal tube that is heated till the plastic becomes plyable and soft like tooth paste. This paste is then pushed through a smaller diameter tube that is heated up to a temperature where the paste evaporates into plastic vapor. This will create some pressure as the vapor takes up more space than solid plastics. The pressure will force the vapors through a cyclone filter that hopefully will catch all the carbon and other solid waste leaving only pure vapors. Now the vapors pass through some heating coils inside a metal tube that heats the vapors to the needed temperature depending on the product you want on the output - diesel, gasoline or combustable gasses. After that the vapors are cooled and condensed into liquid form. Separating the solids and carbons is needed because othervise the heating coils on the last heating phase would cogg up.
What do you think about such aproach?