How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[lowriderzzz]

I think you would want some external heating. I personally don't run a reflux because my catalyst gives me no waxes and im still working on breaking the 90% conversion to liquid mark.

I use one of these - Amico AC 110V 500W 8 x 120mm Heating Element Mould Cartridge Heater - Amazon.com

These are the thermocouples I use to monitor the temperature-
Amazon.com: Amico K Type Nylon Braided 800C 6mm Screw Thermocouple Temperature Sensor 1M 3.3Ft: Home Improvement

I welded a structure to house this because it gets red hot and any of my fiberglass insulation will melt if it touches it.


For the temperature of the reflux for diesel search around in this thread.

I would suggest using 20% of the mass of your plastic as catalyst. Example - 1kg of plastic = 200grams catalyst. For your catalyst, use a small amount of zeolite and use the pottery/perlite for the rest of it. The smaller the size of the particles of the catalyst the better. I've tried all of those catalysts you mentioned and i'd expect you to get a conversion rate of ~75% into liquid fuel by mass.

Thanks once more. I never thought about the ratio catalyst/feedstock. You don't have a reflux column so you put your zeolite and pottery strait in the retort ?

Do you have and are you willing to post/send some picture regarding the mounting of the Thermocouple Temperature Sensor and the Mould Cartridge Heater ?

What device you use to actually see the indicated temperature ? Do you use PID controler with screen or simple electronic thermometer? In other words where do these sensors get plugged ?


Cheers

[mjohnson1]

I recently posted a question about the quality of the diesel produced and received an answer from IMBD

Quote
The diesel is a different matter. If the diesel fraction can be confined to only C15 - C20 it should work well as a fuel. This is all very well in theory but in practice is difficult to do. Too much >C20 will produces waxes which will block filters and cause difficult starting. Too much <C15 will reduce lubrication and cause damage to the injection system and injectors.

Does anyone know of a test to work out the C rating of the produced fuel?

Has anyone tried blending plastic diesel with regular gas station diesel?

My thoughts (hopes) are that blending with new diesel will produce a more stable fuel that wont sludge up or damage engines due to lack of lubrication.

Any thoughts on how to get the diesel within a specific range and or experience of using this fuel would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

google - hydrocarbon chain boiling point

Set up a rig to boil the fuel off safely. good ventilation, respirator, etc

As you go higher up the carbon chain the boiling point increases.

[Mechanical Enginerd]

I recently posted a question about the quality of the diesel produced ahttp://www.astm.org/Standards/D6866.htmd received an answer from IMBD

Quote
The diesel is a different matter. If the diesel fraction can be confined to only C15 - C20 it should work well as a fuel. This is all very well in theory but in practice is difficult to do. Too much >C20 will produces waxes which will block filters and cause difficult starting. Too much <C15 will reduce lubrication and cause damage to the injection system and injectors.

Does anyone know of a test to work out the C rating of the produced fuel?

Has anyone tried blending plastic diesel with regular gas station diesel?

My thoughts (hopes) are that blending with new diesel will produce a more stable fuel that wont sludge up or damage engines due to lack of lubrication.

Any thoughts on how to get the diesel within a specific range and or experience of using this fuel would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Per ASTM send it in to a lab for mass spectrometry analysis to determine carbon to hydrogen ratio.

[mortimer.dan]

Is anyone using the plastic fuel in an engine?

I recently posted a question about the quality of the diesel produced and received an answer from IMBD

Quote
The diesel is a different matter. If the diesel fraction can be confined to only C15 - C20 it should work well as a fuel. This is all very well in theory but in practice is difficult to do. Too much >C20 will produces waxes which will block filters and cause difficult starting. Too much <C15 will reduce lubrication and cause damage to the injection system and injectors.

Does anyone know of a test to work out the C rating of the produced fuel?

Has anyone tried blending plastic diesel with regular gas station diesel?

My thoughts (hopes) are that blending with new diesel will produce a more stable fuel that wont sludge up or damage engines due to lack of lubrication.

Any thoughts on how to get the diesel within a specific range and or experience of using this fuel would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[mjohnson1]

I understand thank you for your comment. I initially plan to pack it with mixture of perilite, zeolite and broken pottery.

Do you think if I will need external heating for the reflux if I cut it in half lets say? Or if its less.

What temperature should I maintain on it if I want to create diesel ?

I think you would want some external heating. I personally don't run a reflux because my catalyst gives me no waxes and im still working on breaking the 90% conversion to liquid mark.

I use one of these - Amico AC 110V 500W 8 x 120mm Heating Element Mould Cartridge Heater - Amazon.com

These are the thermocouples I use to monitor the temperature-
Amazon.com: Amico K Type Nylon Braided 800C 6mm Screw Thermocouple Temperature Sensor 1M 3.3Ft: Home Improvement

I welded a structure to house this because it gets red hot and any of my fiberglass insulation will melt if it touches it.


For the temperature of the reflux for diesel search around in this thread.

I would suggest using 20% of the mass of your plastic as catalyst. Example - 1kg of plastic = 200grams catalyst. For your catalyst, use a small amount of zeolite and use the pottery/perlite for the rest of it. The smaller the size of the particles of the catalyst the better. I've tried all of those catalysts you mentioned and i'd expect you to get a conversion rate of ~75% into liquid fuel by mass.

[Mechanical Enginerd]

Welcome Mechanical Enginerd.
Thanks for making the effort in the marathon read to post 705. Forum members appreciate it. This project is a joint effort with many contributors sharing a vast wealth of knowledge and experience.

I'm interested in the PLC approach to plant management as I've just put together an Arduino microcontroller set up for gas control from thermocouple signal in the retort of my latest prototype. The plan is to use non-condensable and surplus gases as heat for the retort.

Please tell us more. What would a basic PLC cost and how difficult is the programming?

I must confess I have not played with Arduino products at all and should probably investigate this avenue. Or RaspPi for that matter.

The particular PLC's I use on a regular basis can be found here along with all data relating to them. They are fairly inexpensive and thus far I have had no issues getting them to function. Additionally, touch screen displays can be integrated to the PLC to display real time values for whichever parameters you decide to set up. The display also allows the programming of manual controls (for doing sanity checks on code and manual fine tune adjustments to logic parameters instead of having to always have a PC connected to the PLC).

These particular PLC's have expansion slots for analog and digital I/O's discrete I/O's networking modules and other things. See the website for more details.

As pertains to coding. The language used for coding PLC's is ladder logic. It is extremely rudimentary from a language aspect but with that goes simplicity of learning. I spent about a week studying the manuals and some simple ladder logic programs and had a fairly firm grasp on programming.

I hope this helps and I'm continuing to read through the posts.

Has any discussion been had regarding the process of "Thermal Depolymerization" - it is essentially the artificial manufacture of crude from organic compounds by mimicking conditions necessary to produce crude in nature (i.e. High Press., High Temp, No/min O2) You can wikipedia a decent article on the subject.

Thanks

[ekapup]

Jetijs's Avatar Jetijs

hey Jetijs's Avatar
Jetijs I am a big fan of this thank you by the way!! i was just wondering whats on the top of the barrel the black rim looking part whats it called and where can i find a cage like that size .

[lowriderzzz]

lowriderzzz

Yes in my opinion your reflux is too tall given the size of your retort. I would suggest a 25cm-50cm reflux length. Make sure you pack it with stainless wool or something similar while also making sure air can pass through and it isn't clogged.


With a reflux 100 cm long you'd either need an external heat source or a much larger retort that is capable of generating a lot of pyrolysis vapors.

I understand thank you for your comment. I initially plan to pack it with mixture of perilite, zeolite and broken pottery.

Do you think if I will need external heating for the reflux if I cut it in half lets say? Or if its less.

What temperature should I maintain on it if I want to create diesel ?

[mjohnson1]

lowriderzzz

Yes in my opinion your reflux is too tall given the size of your retort. I would suggest a 25cm-50cm reflux length. Make sure you pack it with stainless wool or something similar while also making sure air can pass through and it isn't clogged.


With a reflux 100 cm long you'd either need an external heat source or a much larger retort that is capable of generating a lot of pyrolysis vapors.

[lowriderzzz]

do you think my reflux column is too large

I've just made my reflux column with removable cap for my experimental 8 litters batch unit, but I'm thinking the length of the whole column is too large.

How do you think ?

Its currently 117 cm with the cap and only the column is 1 meter. And also 5,6 cm in diameter.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Well I for one am very sorry to see IMBD go from the forum, but respect his choice.

I too will miss IMBD, but I respect his choices, and understand the conflict, because every time I read someone on here firing up they pyrolysis unit for the first time, and find that all it was was a barrel, and no condenser, I think I should not be on this forum.

Beyond biodiesel if you would be willing to share you experiences or plans for pyrolysis with wood and or plant matter I for one would be happy to listen. Youtube has a guy called Mr Teslonian who does this very well, and gets syngas, a form of crude, uses different catalysts and runs a generator, a propane fridge, heats water all form a single fire, its worth a watch if your interested in this type of thing.

It seems to me that with all the knowledge on here it would be a good idea to band together and plan or build a universal up to date schematic of a complete system, a bit like jetsis did at the start. Things are so much more complex now, anyway probably just thinking out loud ( or on screen ). The link to the plant mentioned is here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arbXj9R6ZXw

Sorry for the long post.

Thanks for your interest mortimer.dan in my approach to bio-gas production. I have been interested in bio-gas and cracking plastics back to petroleum for about 40 years, so I have given these processes a great deal of thought, and research, but not much bench level research until a year and a half ago.

What I see wrong with most of the bio-gas production units that I see is they lack a decent cracking front end, and fractionation back-end, so they are throwing out most of the fuel they make.

What I see here in plastic cracking is typically an inadequate fractionation back-end.

The only difference between what I have and what I will have when I add bio-gas production to my pyrolysis, cracking and fractionation unit is a bio-gas production front end. I plan to just build a bio-gas production unit and pipe it right into my cracking unit. That is the only difference that will take place in my unit.

Welcome Mechanical Enginerd, Excalibur and I are working independently on Arduino controllers for our respective pyrolysis units. I think one of the things that is missing from this thread is a discussion of PLC (programmable logic controller), and Arduinos as PLC (programmable logic controller). So, I look forward to your contribution on this subject.

[mercedes 308]

I can understand Imakebiodiesel's reservations about posting further in this thread. But I think the more well established developers willingness to give advise, has probably saved the less experienced members from tragic mistakes.
This subject is so widespread that without this thread many would have attempted this on their own, with disastrous results. His observations, and input will be sorely missed.

[Excalibur]

Hello Everyone,

First, I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed information to this subject. So far I've read through post 705.

I was wondering whether someone could kindly summarize the findings thus far. What works and what doesn't work primarily from a catalyst standpoint.

By trade I'm a test engineer specializing in control systems. I've been interested in developing a reactor for several years now but have up until now not had the funds nor time to begin this particular endeavor. That being said I have given it much thought. One primary aspect being a method to precisely control conditions in the reactor to optimize output of desired fractions from the reaction.

A simple and relatively inexpensive method would be the utilization of a PLC (programmable logic controller) in conjunction with thermocouples in the condensors that would optimistically be temperature controlled via a heat exchanger and pump controls. Parameters can be very easily dictated through the PLC for different stages in the operating process (i.e. startup, mid range production, tail off assuming a batch reactor configuration), in which valves can be opened and closed from the reflux tower as needed based on operating conditions. The control system setup would not differ much from those used in industrial beer brewing operations.

Sorry to make this so lengthy. If there is interest in this feel free to respond and we can discuss further.

Thanks

Welcome Mechanical Enginerd.
Thanks for making the effort in the marathon read to post 705. Forum members appreciate it. This project is a joint effort with many contributors sharing a vast wealth of knowledge and experience.

I'm interested in the PLC approach to plant management as I've just put together an Arduino microcontroller set up for gas control from thermocouple signal in the retort of my latest prototype. The plan is to use non-condensable and surplus gases as heat for the retort.

Please tell us more. What would a basic PLC cost and how difficult is the programming?

[Mechanical Enginerd]

Summary thus far...

Hello Everyone,

First, I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed information to this subject. So far I've read through post 705.

I was wondering whether someone could kindly summarize the findings thus far. What works and what doesn't work primarily from a catalyst standpoint.

By trade I'm a test engineer specializing in control systems. I've been interested in developing a reactor for several years now but have up until now not had the funds nor time to begin this particular endeavor. That being said I have given it much thought. One primary aspect being a method to precisely control conditions in the reactor to optimize output of desired fractions from the reaction.

A simple and relatively inexpensive method would be the utilization of a PLC (programmable logic controller) in conjunction with thermocouples in the condensors that would optimistically be temperature controlled via a heat exchanger and pump controls. Parameters can be very easily dictated through the PLC for different stages in the operating process (i.e. startup, mid range production, tail off assuming a batch reactor configuration), in which valves can be opened and closed from the reflux tower as needed based on operating conditions. The control system setup would not differ much from those used in industrial beer brewing operations.

Sorry to make this so lengthy. If there is interest in this feel free to respond and we can discuss further.

Thanks

[mortimer.dan]

Regards to All

Well I for one am very sorry to see IMBD go from the forum, but respect his choice. I would like to thank all here esp IMBD for providing such rich information. I am but a lowly junior member but have read all through the post taking notes as i went. I remain very interested and convinced this type of technology will / is starting to filter in to the mainstream. Albeit at very high prices. I am in email contact with old member Asad now and he is doing well I think selling Pyrolysis machines. Safety really is number 1 in this game, i have learn't that so the forum is working not everyone is trying this stuff without proper knowledge. And it is not the responsibility of IMBD or anyone to feel guilty or be conflicted with the knowledge provided, however I can see why it is an issue. People will try this stuff regardless and probably get hurt because they didnt read the whole thread first. Youtube is full of people doing this now. Beyond biodiesel if you would be willing to share you experiences or plans for pyrolysis with wood and or plant matter I for one would be happy to listen. Youtube has a guy called Mr Teslonian who does this very well, and gets syngas, a form of crude, uses different catalysts and runs a generator, a propane fridge, heats water all form a single fire, its worth a watch if your interested in this type of thing.

It seems to me that with all the knowledge on here it would be a good idea to band together and plan or build a universal up to date schematic of a complete system, a bit like jetsis did at the start. Things are so much more complex now, anyway probably just thinking out loud ( or on screen ). The link to the plant mentioned is here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arbXj9R6ZXw

Sorry for the long post.