WMO/WVO Blending, first 50 miles...

[BioFarmer93]

Well, so far so good. I've finally got my filtering/heating/blending/filling station up and running and have put about 56 miles on Henry today with his first tank full of home brew fuel. I found myself nearly holding my breath when I flipped the selector to the front tank this afternoon, but the transition was absolutely seamless and the performance was indiscernible from ULSD. Perhaps the small power loss that many seem to experience with SVO/WVO was mitigated by the addition of WMO to the recipe. The two oils are heated and blended with about 20% ULSD for thinning and ease of filtering. I use a 25 micron filter bag inside of a 10 micron bag initially and heat & recirculate, then a 5 micron bag inside of a 0.5 micron bag with heat and slow recirculation. The slowness on the second round allows the oil to get hotter as it flows through the heater and the water is eliminated as steam.. Here are a couple videos of the setup, I don't know why the titles didn't work this time, and I couldn't see any way to edit them. Any Youtube gurus out there?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjznCg_ST6I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzhsQ0yw4Mo

 

[BioFarmer93]

Well, this morning showed me that I'll need to to start on diesel and purge with diesel before shutting down.. Anybody know if when using an electric fuel pump the fuel will recirculate through the IP if the engine is not running?

 

[gonecrazyi]

It should, when I had a temporary e pump I left it on a few times and never had any problems.

Great to here that you are having good experiences with wvo. I never had any problems until the temps dropped suddenly from the 70's to the high 30's. That wasnt much fun at all.

 

[77f250diesel]

Nice settup Gus.
I know the leakage is minimal around the oil pump shaft, did you find a way to seal it ?


Dennis

 

[BioFarmer93]

Hey Dennis,
No, I didn't. I have read that the leakage at the shaft is/can be a problem but I guess I just got lucky for a change. This one will weep a very small amount but nothing like some of the cases I have read about. It may be because I bought a new pump to modify rather than going to U-PULL-IT and finding a used one with significant wear. I will admit that the shaft seal issue in this particular application of the pump was on my mind and was the reason behind new rather than used. I didn't feel like messing around with the bypass port on it so I just used a piece of .125" plate between the front and back halves when I noticed that the assembly screws were long enough to accommodate the extra thickness... That's where I really expected it to leak since the plate was just mill finish and not machined, but it only will drip every now and then under pressures over 50-60psi, I was amazed...

 

[Diesel JD]

Hey couple of things. You're probably right about the lack of loss of power being due to other stuff in the recipe. You could probably figure it out with materials balance if you really wanted to given a reasonable btu/unit value for each fuel and it's percentage of the blend, but I don't think I know how to do that or that it matters. I think if you start and purge on diesel or bio, you'll be in great shape unless we get in the deep freeze like last year, even then you might be ok. It sounds like you put a lot of effort into developing a good system instead of just throwing crap together. I really would suggest that you purge the lines for just a couple of minutes before you shut down, better would be a dedicated tank with dedicated returns for your cocktail and startup tanks so that the 2 mix absolutely minimally. I understand this may be impossible or impractical and under most circumstances probably doesn't amount to much of an issue. Good luck with it.

 

[gonecrazyi]

Hey Guss, does your truck seem to run better on the mix then with regular diesel? With your pump timing being a little funny it wouldnt surprise me if it ran better. Before I had an IP rebuilt, the t ruck would run a lot better on oil than on diesel.

 

[BioFarmer93]

@JD- Yeah, the purge before shutdown totally did the trick. Henry started right up this morning with no shenanigans or extra cranking so I'm giviing about 4 minutes of run time to purge. I think you are probably right about the limited mixing that occurs with each purge being of no consequence- especially if there is at least a quarter tank of #2 in there to mix with.

@Billy- You know, I just thought it was my imagenation- but he was running real strong without water/alc or HHO... One thing I definitly DID notice though, was that engine noise quieted way down across the entire rpm range.

 

[TWeatherford]

Heating oil to remove water is not effective. There is hygroscopic stuff in used oil, stuff that sucks water out of the air like a dessicant. So unless you remove that stuff (by gravity or centrifuge - which is just gravity on steroids), or flash evaporate the water right before it goes into the IP (not practical), water from the air will dissolve straight back into your oil because its attracted to the hygroscopic particles in the oil.

Mild steel factory tank + WVO will turn to plastic eventually, as will your steel factory fuel lines. This will peel off in chunks and plug filters, lines, etc. Aluminum, plastic, or stainless for the tank and all the lines are the only way to avoid this problem.

These things return very little fuel at idle, not even that much at WOT. I have a 2 tank VO system, no shared filter, and it takes me 90 seconds to purge. So if you want to purge your system which I guess has a shared factory filter, I'd recommend at least a 5 minute purge time due to the larger volume you have to purge. Of course, when you switch the valve, you've got a fair amount of fuel in the common system which is going to now be returned to your "diesel only" tank, so pretty soon you'll have a nice mix of diesel and VO in both your tanks. The only way to do an effective purge long term is to feed the engine with diesel, and return it to your VO tank.

I hope I don't come off as a know it all. I'm just trying to share some insight that has been learned the hard way by myself and lots of others. Your results may vary.

 

[BioFarmer93]

No offense taken- as a matter of fact I highly value input from folks that are doing this. You did notice that WVO is only 40% of the mix, right? Is this still problematic? I'm heating to dewater the final blend, rather than just the WVO by itself, do you see the WMO and #2 ULSD mixed with it as having any properties that would inhibit the hygroscopic action of the WVO in any way? Are you using a centrifuge? I almost bought one last week but wanted to see if it was really necessary since I'm filtering to 0.5 micron. I have read SO many pro's & con's about the need/lack of need for them that I just want to shoot somebody. One camp swears that you MUST 'fuge your oil, the other camp swears that heating and filtering to 0.5 is more than sufficient and that beyond that is ridiculous overkill... As far as a seperate filter for the homebrew tank, I think that's an excellent idea and don't know why I didn't think of it myself. Any insight on rating or type you would like to share?

 

[TWeatherford]

I know nothing about mixing. All I know are about straight diesel and straight, heated, vegetable oil. I think that mixing is just going to give you the same problems slower than if you were running straight VO, although it may be surprisingly faster or slower. I don't really know the chemistry going into the mix.

I'm running a filter and base that I got from NAPA. The base was around $26, which is the best price I could find anywhere, and has three holes in it for mounting (I put mine on the outside frame rail). The filters are like $7 each and are rated for 10 micron, no water block feature (general consensus is that it doesn't do anything but remove free water, which shouldn't be going in the tank anyway, it doesn't do anything about suspended water). I can dig up some part numbers if you'd like. Last time I looked to buy another of these filter bases NAPA was backordered on them (that was a few months ago). I want to use it for my diesel as well since the filters are so much cheaper.

There are a ton of opinions on filtering. I started out using gravity and gentle heating to do most of my filtering/dewatering, and then conventional filters as a finishing pass. This worked well, but I wanted something that would work faster so went the Cfuge route. The Cfuge is nice, but comes at a price. I certainly don't think that a Cfuge is absolutely necessary to get clean, dry oil, but it is probably easier to successfully actually get clean, dry oil. If you're filtering to 0.5 micron absolute, you're doing very well. After that it just becomes a matter of getting the water out effectively, which a Cfuge or gravity will do. Only thing a Cfuge will do as far as particulate matter is save you having to replace your filters as often.