Anyone have info on Ferromit.com

Brad S.

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Haven't been on in a while, but I'm curious if anyone has any info on these "guys".
Ferromit.com i think is a company from New Zealand, they have many items, but the things that caught my eye are the waste oil "stills".
Watched some videos from people using these "stills" looks kinda interesting, next level of processing waste oil on a small scale.
Thanks guys.
 

laserjock

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That hurts my head. I did a project on this way back in school where we tried to distill motor oil. It can be done but you typically need vacuum to reduce the boiling point or you end up with tar in the flask. The real question is what is the efficiency of the system. liters in vs liters out. I suspect its not that great. I could believe that all it's doing is pulling off the lighter fractions. One thing is for sure, you would not have to worry about metal contaminants hurting things. 4 kw is a LOT of electricity though.
 

Brad S.

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Yep on the electricity, one of the videos I watched looms like they use all 110v and no vacuum, just normal atmosphere pressure. But the finished product is what interests me.
 

laserjock

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Agreed. If they are in New Zealand it's probably 240 V. Most of the rest of the world is. 4 kW is a lot of 110 V. They say there is no vacuum. Makes it harder to run continuous flow but a little vacuum would make it more efficient. It would be really clean. The only thing you would have to worry about is the water fraction. Any water would distill over too if the column isn't designed just right it will condense and go with the product. If it were designed right, it would blow out the top of the condenser.

One thing for sure, no way you could get it that clean by filtration.
 

Brad S.

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Yep, the vacuum part would help a lot.
Running a A/C vacuum pump vs. more power for heating units....
Another curious thing, there are 2 different kinds of stills.
Waste oil distiller and Oil reformer, for the most part doing the same thing.
Thanks for the info on 240v, thats kinda important in researching this idea.
 

laserjock

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I pondered this over the weekend a little and talked to a buddy about it. We both came to the same conclusion of we would really like to see an analysis of what comes out the back end of the process. One potential problem is you could be concentrating things you don't want going through your engine... like acids that may have a similar boiling point or a high enough boiling point that it is coming over with your oil fraction. I've been a research chemist for close to 15 years and there are a lot of things about this that strike me as conspicuous. I'd have to know a LOT more before I put anything that came through that type of system through my engine.

The other thing is cleaning the thing would have to be a nightmare. You know the internal parts have got to be coated in tar and eventually will have to be cleaned.
 

Brad S.

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One potential problem is you could be concentrating things you don't want going through your engine... like acids that may have a similar boiling point or a high enough boiling point that it is coming over with your oil fraction. I've been a research chemist for close to 15 years and there are a lot of things about this that strike me as conspicuous. I'd have to know a LOT more before I put anything that came through that type of system through my engine.

The other thing is cleaning the thing would have to be a nightmare. You know the internal parts have got to be coated in tar and eventually will have to be cleaned.

You think the acidic level would be higher than "normal" wmo..???
Can a person check PH levels in wmo with normal PH paper, or check regular diesel fuel to get a range..

On one of the videos I watched, think the oil reformer video, they had a soda bottle attached to one of the discharges from the top of the "column", he was calling it distillate, I suppose the start of gasoline...??
More discharge points on a column gives a bigger range of products, right??
Do you know if acidic fluids have similar boiling temps??? or maybe I should say, acidic stuff from wmo...???
The cleaning of these distiller had crossed my mind too.
 

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The problem with testing pH is you have to have water by definition to have pH. Standard pH papers don't work in organic solution I.e oil. That doesn't mean that there is no acid or base present. It just means it's not detectable with the paper. You may be able to do an extraction into water and test pH but that's a little bit of a stretch.

As for distilling, the video I saw showed a temp of 400 C I think. I doubt it was F because of where they are. That's scary in itself because the lighter fractions probable have a flash point lower than that. It makes sense to me tem wise because c22 hydrocarbon could be in that area for sure. I think #2 is typically like c12 to c22. Sulfuric acid boils at 337 C. Nitric acid boils at 83 C. I could see both of those showing up in used oil. Especially motor oil. So you would be distilling those over as well as the hydrocarbons in the range you want. Same amount of acid in a smaller volume, to me that's concentrating it down. May be a problem or not depending on your feedstock. I would guess things that are highly sulferized (like gear oil) heated in air will make more potentially acidic compounds too.
 

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So Laser J, what kind of electrical element could a person use that can generate that kind of heat??? Just trying to wargame this would be project out....
 

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Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. I would probably make it either with some cartridge heaters in a block or a pancake heater like is used on a diffusion vacuum pump. It basically has to get hot enough to boil heavy silicone oil. That's where I'd start. I think you would probably burn up like a water tank heater. They aren't designed to run that hot.

A lot of the key to this is sizing. The smaller the rig is the less wattage you need or conversely you could run at a lower duty cycle on bigger heaters. An aluminum block with a couple big cartridge heaters would probably get the job done.
 
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Brad S.

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So now educate me, how can a person figure how much it costs per hour/etc to run a element like that...????
I know this method, distilled wmo, is gonna cost more then running thru a CF & other filters, but it's the quality of the final product that really keeps me thinking about this....
$200 to download plans for this small scale distiller....
 

laserjock

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Once you know the wattage of the element it's easy. Say you have a 1000W element. You run that element for 1 hr. You have now used 1 kW hr of electricity. That's the easy part. Sizing the element to your process will be much more difficult. power= Voltage x amperage. Looking at the site, he's heating about a 3L pot. That's going to be probably 1.5 to 2 kW heater to be able to run continuous. Given there is probably a duty cycle figure in there. Probably not running flat out all the time. Figure once you get to temperature a 50% duty cycle is not totally unreasonable. At a 2 kW heater, that's still 1 kW hr per hour.

I still question how he is doing this at atmospheric pressure, with "no oxygen" getting into the system. It states that on the web site in the section about safety. He must be using a thumper type setup is all I can figure. In those systems the vapor bubbles through a second tank of liquid. I guess that would keep it from sucking air in through the exit. I'm just having a hard time sorting this out from the pictures. You will probably need chilled water of some type to cool the condenser too so figure that into your calculations.
 

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Ok, the 110 voltage side I do kinda of understand, through the years of looking at my electric bill for the house etc.
Then how does a person figure 220 voltage is just x2 or x2.2 of what 110 voltage figures out...

Then I'd like to talk about if a certain "structure" of this mythical distiller... if a person runs some type of vacuum setup, the input & output side both need to be contained in the vacuum system, probably constructed of metal, to hold up under vacuum... correct???
Otherwise it seems to me it would be very hard to maintain the vacuum..
Also it might be good to let gravity work in our favor, make the input side elevated enough for the wmo to flow in the top of the distiller...the body of the distiller then needs to be elevated some...then the output side or finished product, would be ground level....
Years ago I worked at a ethanol plant in maintenance, so I'm fairly familiar with how vacuum should work in distillation...
 

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It's easier to think about power consumption in watts. Takes the pain out of it. Watts = volts X amps. So if an element is 1200 watts it draws 10 amps at 120 or 5 at 240 volts. It's essentially 5 per 120 leg so it's still 10 amps if you separate the legs. Anyway knowing these parameters you can calculate the kWh it will consume.

I suspect that what they are doing to keep air out is they have designed the inside similar to that of an oil diffusion pump. An oil diffusion pump displaces air with oil vapor that condenses and runs back down slowly. The diffusion pump oil is a special silicone based oil that will sixth stand a lot of temperature and not oxidize so bad. It will however bake out if you open it up to atmosphere (air) while it's hot. I could envision a system where the oil is fed in and is heated and distilled over and the air is kept out by something that looks like a plumbing trap. The thing I have a hard time with is how do you separate the waste off the bottom. Unless the incoming stuff is passing over a heated surface and the volatiles are coming off before the waste drips into a catch basin. That's probably what they are doing. I'd love to know what the efficiency is. Volume in to volume out.

More I think about it, I don't think it would be terribly hard to build but I just don't know if it's worth it.

That probably is a lot of rambling that doesn't answer your questions.
 

Brad S.

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Thanks again for the info....
All good info, no rambling here...

The bottom end of the distiller probably is mostly junk, in the videos it looks like the "main" outlet for "diesel fuel" is a little higher on the side of the unit....
Think in this pic the electric elements are on the back side...
And in the heat efficiency area, wrapping everything to keep the heat in would help too,....duh...

Is there a way to figure how efficient using a vacuum system would be over just open atmosphere system???
I know thats kinda hard to figure, but for instance would using a vacuum setup be 20%, 30% more efficient on electricity....is it worth extra cost and effort...??? Just kinda thinking out loud.

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