Here's a blog I wrote up about the class:
I had a great time teaching a biodiesel class in Milwaukee, WI this past weekend- we packed the house, and the students included
everyone from contractors to welders to a firefighter to a bunch of high
school teachers to members of the local biodiesel distribution co-op and
several local homebrewers with experience and even one bad batch to
contribute. There were a couple of SVO cars in the parking lot to look at.
The contingent of teachers were from Bloom High School in Chicago, and
some of them got a grant from BP a while back to include biodiesel in
their curriculum (two were chem teachers and one was a biology teacher).
Here's a link to a story about the grant and one of the teachers:
http://www.wbez.org/CityRoom_Story.aspx?storyID=12669
The teachers brought half their own lab- it was funny opening the trunk
of their Jetta to discover a jug of sulfuric acid, a big pile of
burettes (fragile) kinda clanking around loose on the back seat among
with their camping equipment and sleeping bags, and a huge array of
other biodiesel supplies. They had everything but the kitchen sink in
there. One of them , Barry Latham, brought a sample of a home-built
filter column for doing experiments with zeolite (he was testing 4A
zeolite to remove water from finished biodiesel, with very good results)
An amusing aside is that as has happened before, the science teachers
ended up talking "over me" during the class more than any of the other
students- for which we made fun of them mercilessly (they teach high
school, where you'd think they'd get the same treatment from their own
kids). I have seen this in class before- amusingly, the other example
was a high school shop teacher with biofuels experience who sat in the
back, talked to his other teacher friends during my lecture, and made
what ended out to be the worst fuel in the room during the lab.
The teacher contingent ended up conducting some slightly more advanced
experiments during the labs (soap water neutralization with their
sulfuric acid and my bromophenol blue), and of course everyone wanted to
be in their 'lab group'. We had a fairly long period of "open lab" at
the end with everyone enthusiastically trying out different things, so I
think a lot of folks got to see a variety of techniques and experiments.
Some people ended up going home with the experiments, and some supplies
to finish washing and 3/27 testing them to see the outcome of the
experiments. We made and broke an amazing emulsion (of fuel that passed
the 3/27 test, incidentally, so we got to see how to troubleshoot the
causes of emulsions and narrow it down to glycerine contamination in
this case).
Jill Krysinski, the biology teacher from Bloom High School science club
ended up putting together a powerpoint of her notes and photos- which I
think is really useful. It doesn't show every single step of the
process- no drying tests or cold tests or quality control stuff, but has
a lot of info as she captured it (there's one or two very minor
mis-interpretations as with any note-taking 1) amberlite is not
molecular sieve, and it's used for soap removal in commercial biodiesel
plants, not water removal 2) the photo of what she thought was finished
fuel ready to dry was actually a 'first wash' that someone brought in,
but this point wasn't made very clear by me and 3) I don't think I said
anything about color of finished biodiesel meaning that the fuel is bad,
but one particular batch she photographed in class was poor conversion
AND happened to be really dark- people shouldn't interpret her comments
as saying that 'dark' is a sign of poor conversion as it could just as
easily be a sign of onions being fried in the oil or other sources of
dark color). The class covered more info than just this basic process,
incidentally- but she mostly put the 'basics' into the powerpoint. She
has a lot of my info in there that I dont normally see covered on the
forums- things about BOD of wash water, for instance.
Here is a link to Jill's Powerpoint about making biodiesel- most of
these photos came from the class
http://www.bloomhs.org/apps/classes/show_assignment.jsp..._ID=170187&rn=475519
Incidentally, I told this class to use 8 g/liter for KOH rather than
the usual 7 g/liter because I was 'rounding up' a bit from compensating
for a 90% purity KOH. I'm starting to think that KOH is often less pure
than the assay states, and that using 'a bit more' is a good idea. It
seems to me that people who switch from NaOH to KOH experience
conversion problems sometimes, and the explanation is either that the
KOH isn't as concentrated as the manufacturer says, or that the user
allows large buckets of KOH to deteriorate from frequent opening
(whereas they still sometimes buy NaOH in small containers at Lowes
hardware stores under the Roebic brand so it doesn't have as much of a
chance to carbonize)
We tried to get everyone thinking about how to set up experiments well-
things like not changing more than one variable when you do test
batches. We had a good example from one of the hosts of a 'bad batch'-
NaOH biodiesel glop that he has 50 gallons of- so people really got the
idea of what can go wrong and how to avoid it. He was able to make a
perfectly usable batch of fuel from the same bad oil, using KOH, and I
think it made it fairly obvious to everyone that they shouldn't even
bother working with NaOH due to this and other risks.
I think everyone got a lot out of the whole thing and of course we're
trying to get them onto the local Wisconsin/Illinois email list ( to
join send an email to
biodiesel-subscribe@v2b.org ) so they stay in
touch. I'll probably teach this class again and also do an advanced
topics class either here or in Michigan sometime in the early spring, so
as to be able to catch the farmers before they get busy. Last year I
taught this class in Michigan in early March and I'll probably aim for
the same sort of timing this spring- early March was the latest that the
farmers were really available up there so I'll come around in late
Febuary or early March.
Big thanks to the Milwaukee biodiesel co-op, the folks who do the
Biodiesel@v2b.org Chicagoland email list, Swee of Future Green, and Kyle
Capizzi for hosting this class!
Links:
Chicago/Wisconsin/Illinois mailing list for those interested in
biodiesel and SVO: no web page currently, to join send an email to
biodiesel-subscribe@v2b.org
Milwaukee biodiesel co-op, selling commercially produced ASTM biodiesel:
http://www.mkebio.org/
Future Green, a green/fair trade products store that helped sponsor us
and found us the good site to have the class:
www.futuregreen.net
Biodiesel schoolteacher email list for others who integrate biodiesel
into elementary or high school curriculum:
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/biodiesel_in_schools
Jill's Powerpoint with notes and photos from my class:
http://www.bloomhs.org/apps/classes/show_assignment.jsp..._ID=170187&rn=475519
Mark
Linear Mode
