How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Watch my set up, go to YouTube and then search for franciso Gerardo nungaray. a few stuff are in english the ones in spanish I can help you to translate

Fantastico, gerardo!!

I should clarify - I have not used AC with thick oil. The oil fuel I used it on was already thinned down to a diesel-like viscosity. I expect if the fuel is thinned it is easier to 'de-tangle' the particulate contaminants from the longer hydrocarbon chains and get them locked into the pores of the AC for removal from the fuel.
Col

Yes, i would think activated charcoal would work better at removing dissolved and suspended carbon from WMO if the WMO were thinned first with gasoline. Your results seem reasonable, so I have ordered 5LB (2.3LG) of activated charcoal to try it on some of my WMO.

Hi Everybody
I would like to Introduce myself, from New Delhi.
I have read the extensive thread 100+ pages (and also started rereading it), it has been fascinating to be excited about a project like Pyrolysis and gain so much knowledge from the Forum.
I am building a home made Pyrolysis system for waste plastics .
Will post pictures of the equipment shortly.

I will be asking for advice for faults, guidance and reference and would like to share the experience with the forum.

My first question is that I am going to use a Tandoor (Clay Oven ) to fit the Reactor in. Will a clay oven be sufficient for insulation and gain the necessary temperatures required ( up to 500 degrees?)

Regards

Welcome, dippy909, it is good to know that you have read through the forum. I see no reason why a Tandoor (Clay Oven) would not work; however, you may need to modify the design slightly to accommodate your heating method, and the temperatures that you wish to reach, but clay is an excellent insulator, that can indeed handle cracking temperatures.

[dippy909]

Pyrolysis Start

Hi Everybody
I would like to Introduce myself, from New Delhi.
I have read the extensive thread 100+ pages (and also started rereading it), it has been fascinating to be excited about a project like Pyrolysis and gain so much knowledge from the Forum.
I am building a home made Pyrolysis system for waste plastics .
Will post pictures of the equipment shortly.

I will be asking for advice for faults, guidance and reference and would like to share the experience with the forum.

My first question is that I am going to use a Tandoor (Clay Oven ) to fit the Reactor in. Will a clay oven be sufficient for insulation and gain the necessary temperatures required ( up to 500 degrees?)

Regards

[Hoddamdg11]

Arduino

Excalibur, FYI there is an article in January's Silicon chip magazine on "Arduino - Controlled Fuel Injection for Small Engines" which may be of interest to you.

[Col]

Activated charcoal and oil fuel cleaning

Thanks, Col, for posting your positive experience with using activated charcoal to clean up WMO. If I knew it could do such a good job, then it is doubtful I would have bothered with making a WMO distillation system. Even so, if it works, then I see no reason to distill WMO.

The method that I would employ would be to blend the WMO with gasoline at about 20%, leave it to settle for about 1 month, pour off the thin WMO from the sediments, then pour it into a bucket of activated charcoal and leave there for some period of time, yet to be determined, then screen out the activated charcoal, then filter down to 1-micron, and/or use a centrifuge.

I should clarify - I have not used AC with thick oil. The oil fuel I used it on was already thinned down to a diesel-like viscosity. I expect if the fuel is thinned it is easier to 'de-tangle' the particulate contaminants from the longer hydrocarbon chains and get them locked into the pores of the AC for removal from the fuel.
Col

[gerardo]

this is my set up

Watch my set up, go to YouTube and then search for franciso Gerardo nungaray. a few stuff are in english the ones in spanish I can help you to translate

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Hi bgKiril
I have used activated carbon on black oil/diesel and it works well if you have the right pore size. I tried a GS1300 and was told I should expect the AC to clean the product up in about 20-30 mins. I had to wait over night to get a decent result. The longer I left it the better the result. I didn't try it beyond that so I don't know if the AC will last very long in this application. I recall someone else posting somewhere they didn't get much life out of their AC tests. The salesman did tell me to filter the fluid to 10 micron first so the suspended sediment would not plug the tiny pores in the AC. Perhaps the other fellow did not filter his sample first so the AC just plugged up with 'sludge' and was never given a fair go. I found that the AC both 'bleached' the fluid to a pale yellow colour and minimised the odour. I am concerned a little about the coarse nature of AC, the fine particles are about 1-2 micron, up to about 20 micron, very sharp, hard and abrasive, I don't want to put that through my engine. Even though I filter the light waste oil to 1 micron (nominal) for my burner at work the spray nozzle still wears out. The fine metal particles eventually wear the nozzle orifice too large for a good spray pattern and I get flame failure. Do you want that in your vehicle?

Alternatively you could have a look at this polymer bead product - Bluegrass Fuel Systems, LLC - The FP Filtration Media
I have not tried it, at this stage I hope I don't need it. Once I've put a system together and done a few batches I'll have a better idea. It may suit a blender very well? I am hoping the process of cracking / distillation will drop most of the fines and darkness out if I can avoid boilover.

All the best
Col

Thanks, Col, for posting your positive experience with using activated charcoal to clean up WMO. If I knew it could do such a good job, then it is doubtful I would have bothered with making a WMO distillation system. Even so, if it works, then I see no reason to distill WMO.

The method that I would employ would be to blend the WMO with gasoline at about 20%, leave it to settle for about 1 month, pour off the thin WMO from the sediments, then pour it into a bucket of activated charcoal and leave there for some period of time, yet to be determined, then screen out the activated charcoal, then filter down to 1-micron, and/or use a centrifuge.

[Col]

Activated carbon and polymer beads

I tried with putting active charcoal but nothing happen.

Hi bgKiril
I have used activated carbon on black oil/diesel and it works well if you have the right pore size. I tried a GS1300 and was told I should expect the AC to clean the product up in about 20-30 mins. I had to wait over night to get a decent result. The longer I left it the better the result. I didn't try it beyond that so I don't know if the AC will last very long in this application. I recall someone else posting somewhere they didn't get much life out of their AC tests. The salesman did tell me to filter the fluid to 10 micron first so the suspended sediment would not plug the tiny pores in the AC. Perhaps the other fellow did not filter his sample first so the AC just plugged up with 'sludge' and was never given a fair go. I found that the AC both 'bleached' the fluid to a pale yellow colour and minimised the odour. I am concerned a little about the coarse nature of AC, the fine particles are about 1-2 micron, up to about 20 micron, very sharp, hard and abrasive, I don't want to put that through my engine. Even though I filter the light waste oil to 1 micron (nominal) for my burner at work the spray nozzle still wears out. The fine metal particles eventually wear the nozzle orifice too large for a good spray pattern and I get flame failure. Do you want that in your vehicle?

Alternatively you could have a look at this polymer bead product - Bluegrass Fuel Systems, LLC - The FP Filtration Media
I have not tried it, at this stage I hope I don't need it. Once I've put a system together and done a few batches I'll have a better idea. It may suit a blender very well? I am hoping the process of cracking / distillation will drop most of the fines and darkness out if I can avoid boilover.

All the best
Col

[viesis2]

Sveiks !

Mēs veidojam jaunu start-up biznesa ideju, par šāda tipa rūpnīcu, kuru taisamies atvērt Vācijā.Meklējam cilvēku, kurš zin šajā jomā ko dara un ir apņēmības pilns strādāt šī projekta realizācijā. Mēs esam jauni studenti, bet ar iespēju dabūt financējumu šim projektam.Vēlētos uzzināt ko vairāk par šo tēmu. Ja ir interese un ir vēlme strādāt, padodiet ziņu viesis2@inbox.lv !

Paldies !

The process is really simple, it is similar to how alcohol is made. If you heat plastic waste in non oxygen environment, it will melt, but will not burn. After it has melted, it will start to boil and evaporate, you just need to put those vapors through a cooling pipe and when cooled the vapors will condense to a liquid and some of the vapors with shorter hydrocarbon lengths will remain as a gas. The exit of the cooling pipe is then going through a bubbler containing water to capture the last liquid forms of fuel and leave only gas that is then burned. If the cooling of the cooling tube is sufficient, there will be no fuel in the bubbler, but if not, the water will capture all the remaining fuel that will float above the water and can be poured off the water. On the bottom of the cooling tube is a steel reservoir that collects all the liquid and it has a release valve on the bottom so that the liquid fuel can be poured out. Here are some pictures to better understand the design:









This device works on electricity (3 phase), it has six nichrome coils as heating elements and consumes a total of 6kW (1kW each coil). The coils are turned on and off by three solid state relays, one for each phase, the relays are controlled by a digital thermostat with a temperature sensor just a bit below the lid, so that the vapor temperature can be monitored. You need to heat the plastic slowly to about 350 degrees and just wait till it does the magic. Our device has a capacity of 50 liters and can hold about 30 kg of shredded plastic. The process takes about 4 hours, but it can be shortened considerably by tweaking the design a bit. As I said, this makes a liquid fuel that can be used as multifuel, that means it can be used on diesel engines and also on gasoline engines, but we still need to test it will work on gasoline. It works for diesel engines just fine, that has already been tested. There is a difference in what plastic you use, if you use polyethylene (plastic cans, plastic foil, and all kind of flexible non break plastics) you will get out liquid fuel that will solidify as it cools into paraffin, it is still good for diesel engines as long as you use a heated fuel tank, because it needs to be heated just about at 30 degrees celsius to be liquid and transparent. If you don't want that, you can put the paraffin through the device for one more time and you will chop those hydrocarbons even smaller and half of the paraffin will turn to liquid fuel and other half will remain a paraffin, but much denser and will melt at higher temperatures, this is the stuff you can make candles out of and it does not smell at all when burned, maybe a bit like candles. But if you use polypropylene (computer monitor cases, printer cases, other plastics that break easily), you get out only liquid fuel, no paraffin at all. All you need is just filter the fuel out of solids and you good to go and put it in your gas tank. We have made the analysis and it is almost the perfect diesel fraction. It has no acids or alkalines in it, like fuel from tires does. The unit in the pictures can convert about 60 kg of plastic into 60 liters of fuel in one day. Other methods of heating the reactor can be employed, electricity is just easier to work with and control. Some Japanese companies manufacture such devices, but their prices for this size unit is more than 100 000$, our home made device cost us 900$ max. We use aluminum oxide bricks to insulate the heat, they are light as foam and can be easily cut in any shape, but any kind of insulator can be used. The bricks make the highest costs for this device. It can also be made using liquid fuel burners to heat the reactor, this will enable to make the device self sustainable by using about 10-15% of the produced fuel along with the produced gas. A small farm can use a device this size and make fuel for itself by converting plastic waste to fuel, farms have very much plastic waste and it is a big problem, at least in my country. Our next goal is to make the same thing possible using biomass, every farm could then use old leafs, wet grass, saw dust and all kind of biomass and gasify it into tar like substance that can then be put through the pyrolysis device and turned into biodiesel. But we will see about that. Here are some fuel samples:

These are samples from polyethylene, in the first run out comes mostly paraffin like liquid that solidifies at temperatures below 20 degrees celsius, the other clear sample is from the same paraffin that is gone through the process one more time. Will post more pictures and a video later.
Thanks,
Jetijs

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Hi Dudes ,

First of all, greetings from Bulgaria I have made a machine similar to yours and had tested with car tires. I get liquid shown to the photos.

Welcome bgKiril, thanks for posting a photo of your results of pyrolysis of tires.

My question is how to clean that liquide oil ? I understand that that liquide i got is both diesel and gasoline. How to seperate them ?
I tried with putting active charcoal but nothing happen. Is there any chemical that could to clean that liquide from any hard parts inside ?

Cleaning and separating, or fractionating, are 2 different subjects. As Excalibur, said, you can fractionate your distillate by creating a series of heated containers down stream from your retort, where you cook your tires. Each heated container will trap fractions that condense at those temperatures. The temperatures that are commonly used for fractions are: 300c, 200c, 100c, 25c, then 0c. This is what I do.

You should notice, as many of us have, that the further your fractions get from the retort, the clearer the liquid. The reason for this, is frequently small particles of carbon come from the retort in the form of boil-over.

One solution therefore to clean up your collected fluids is re-distill them, and you are likely to find a cleaner, clearer liquid. It takes about 3 stages of distilling to eliminate the carbon boil-over.

Otherwise, as Excalibur said, you can settle, filter, and centrifuge your liquid to get it cleaner.

[Excalibur]

Welcome bgKiril and congratulations.

To separate, simply hold the fuel at a temperature that forces the gasoline to evaporate. This vapor can then be condensed, becoming the gasoline fraction. I suggest try 80*C and hold for as long as required to drive off the lighter fraction. At a later stage, you can do this "on the fly" as the fuel is being made. The benefit is that it doesn't have to be re-heated so saves energy.

The fuel will need to be filtered as it will have a lot of fine particles too small to see. Use a centrifuge or a series of filters starting from coarse to fine. I suggest each method should be finalized with a 1 micron filter pass. Allowing the fuel to settle will help separate the heaviest particles, saving the filters from early blocking. In any case it would be prudent to filter down to at least one step below the onboard filter of the vehicle it will be used in.

Hope this helps.

[bgKiril]

Hi Dudes ,

First of all, greetings from Bulgaria
I have made a machine similar to yours and had tested with car tires. I get liquid shown to the photos.



My question is how to clean that liquide oil ? I understand that that liquide i got is both diesel and gasoline. How to seperate them ?
I tried with putting active charcoal but nothing happen. Is there any chemical that could to clean that liquide from any hard parts inside ?

[Beyond Biodiesel]

I also plan on making as much diesel as possible, in your experience is more conveniant to have just a single condenser? And the naptha and lighter gases condense in the bubbler or get burn along with the uncondesable gases? I don't want to use adittional condensers if i don't need them. Looks simpler with just 1.
Thank you, very nice setup, keep it going!

The thing that a lot of people do not get is light fractions, like naptha, can be blended with heavier practions, like motor oil, to make diesel fuel. So there is no reason not to collect the lighter fractions. That is why I collect them.

Beyond Biodiesel,

Thank you for the insight, didn't thought to insulate the exposed connection pipes, also didn't knew that fiber glass would melt at ~200*c so, you helped me dodge a bullet. Btw is any way to test if the fiber in my condensers is made of glass, would it burn in open flame? They have diferent colours and consistency.

If you are not sure that an insulation can handle the heat, then hold i over a flame, like a match or candle. If it melts or burns, then it cannot handle the heat.

I can't seem to find rockwool in here, but i found some ceramic wool, the problem is that is so darn expensive. Just as the electricity, so this is why i'm using open flame, also wmo is quite cheap. Also thanks for the insulation link, that info is valuable!

To the best of my knowledge rockwool, kaowool and ceramic wool are all the same thing. If you are having trouble finding high temperature insulation, then search out art stores and ceramic supply stores, because they are likely to have high temperature insulation for ceramicists.

But you can also make your own high temperature insulation out of a wide range of materials. For instance, if there are any volcanoes in your region, then there might be pumice stone in large quantities where you can just drive a truck up to a public quarry and shovel it in. Diatamoceous earth can also be used as insulation.

Insulation can be made out of a composite of materials. For instance the first layer has to handle 800F (425c) But it need only be 1" 2.45cm) thick. The outer layers can be sheet rock, or even cardboard with layers of sheet metal in between.

Also the idea of using another heater on top of my reactor is starting to scare me too, so can i ask you how you heat your retort?

The first 5 stages of my pyrolysis unit are heated with electrical resistance heaters. The bottom of the retort has a simple element from an electric stove, then band heaters on the sides, then high temperature line wrap on the tubes, then the next stage heated condenser has nothing more than an electric frying pan as its heater, the the next one uses a plat warmer, etc.

Now i can't decide on my heat exchanger design, and all the holidays aren't helping, it's closed everywhere and i still didn't found a proper lid, some parts are caught in postal offices.... well i guess i'l just have to wait untill the next year, also my welder won't work in the holidays, so you could say i'm on a forced break!

Thank you guys, all the best!

Doing pyrolysis safely is a big deal, and expensive. So, take your time.

[Excalibur]

BB & Col
Thanks for the comments. Actually I've got two of the central heating "gun burners" (we call them), however both have dead ignition transformers.
I have a couple of possibilities to find a transformer, one won't be known at least till 6th Jan when the man gets back from holiday. New ones on Ebay but at 5kg means shipping would make cost more than double.
The one I had running before it lost the spark, really looked good and I was excited about the prospect. One is 11amp and I think the other is 10. That's over 2KW, just for spark. But what a spark! The force of the fan stretches the spark into the path of the diesel. I was amazed, I never knew spark could be affected by wind.
.
One of the gun burners I picked up.

I have another thing to try in the meantime. Google found details of gas fired ceramic kilns.



Just by chance and without realizing it, the forced air burner design above is what I used on an earlier prototype. That was more stable. The bubbler was creating a stop~start nature to the gas flow which did occasionally flameout.

If there's time before gun burner parts turn up, I'm going to fit a number of gas nozzles in various locations and using flexible hose, connect each one in turn. In addition I think I'll make the nozzles small, not the open port style of before. Also when I first fire up the turk from cold, I'll siphon all the gases to the gasjar so that when the retort hits the target I'll kill the IP and have a quantity of gas as a buffer.

Fox32
Yes, please read the forum. There is a wealth of information and the best part is that it is free and there are gems amongst the pages! You only need to do a little harvesting and separating wheat from chaff.

Retort insulation is essential for efficiency while the process will work without, the heat/energy loss will be huge. My first two prototype attempts were un-insulated wood fired. Wood was free and in abundance though. Tip:When you do go with insulation, do so in such a way as to be able to recycle it to your next generation of retort.

The reflux dimensions are on my DIYdiesel blog "reflux page" along with the making plus "retort vessel page" has how the flange and connecting pipe is welded.

Like yours, my focus is on diesel and I want to maximize the output of that product even at the expense of other fraction/s. So I have 1 condenser. The reflux temperature aims to force only the release of nothing heavier than diesels' heaviest fraction while on the downstream side of the diesel reservoir, only the most volatile fraction/s are driven off. In this way, I save the maximum range of fractions that makes up diesel. And yes, burn the rest as heat.

[Col]

burner system

I have examined the gas-fired heating units. They all have 2-3 spark plugs in them with a high voltage power supply, and it looks like the spark plugs run continuously. So, you might try that.

On my (fire tube) boiler burner (small Dunphy unit, good and reliable) at work it has a couple of electrodes which arc up to ignite the sprayed / atomised light oil I use as boiler fuel. The electrodes seem to be run off 240V, 10A max (I'm not the best at reading electrical diagrams). These electrodes are positioned just in front and to the side of the fuel nozzle (far enough away to avoid carbon build up on the electrodes and close enough for ignition) and start arcing in conjunction with the fan blowing 12 seconds before the fuel pump kicks in. They do not get 'wet' in the fuel spray, but ignite the vapours off to the side which in turn light the rest of the fuel. They are regulated by a light sensor. They don't arc up if there is light / flame in the combustion chamber as the injected fuel will ignite when it reaches the existing flame so the electrodes are not necessary at this point. If the flame goes out for some reason (poor atomising, water in the fuel, fuel line blockage) the light sensor turns the fuel pump off and rings an annoying bell until someone goes over to see what is wrong. There is a safety delay of about 30 sec before I can restart the burner, allowing the draft created by the tall exhaust flue to suck any excess vapours out of the combustion chamber before the fuel pump can add more volatiles to the chamber. Backfires are rare but there is a delay between flame failure and the burner shutting down so backfires are possible. I presume the electrodes arc up again at this stage because the flame will sometimes ignite anew if the problem was temporary (a few seconds), but if the problem persists the burner shuts down.
I have bought (though not yet tested) a Crown C-10 Flame Detector from ebay for less than $10 which I intend to use for this purpose.
I will be trying to add some of these features to my burner system eventually. Perhaps they are of help to others.

Regards
Col

[fox32]

Excalibur,

Thank you, i tried to undesrtand the principle as much as possible, so i can replicate it in a safe way. And i recommand it to anyone, READ the FORUM. At least the first 40 pages.

Also thanks for the tips, didn't thought of insulating the retort, also your reflux looks bigger than i imaginated, you also have catalist inside? An very nice video, i'm most impressed with your skills in adapting a car injection pump into a turk enginer. Very nice work!

I also plan on making as much diesel as possible, in your experience is more conveniant to have just a single condenser? And the naptha and lighter gases condense in the bubbler or get burn along with the uncondesable gases? I don't want to use adittional condensers if i don't need them. Looks simpler with just 1.
Thank you, very nice setup, keep it going!

Beyond Biodiesel,

Thank you for the insight, didn't thought to insulate the exposed connection pipes, also didn't knew that fiber glass would melt at ~200*c so, you helped me dodge a bullet. Btw is any way to test if the fiber in my condensers is made of glass, would it burn in open flame? They have diferent colours and consistency.

I can't seem to find rockwool in here, but i found some ceramic wool, the problem is that is so darn expensive. Just as the electricity, so this is why i'm using open flame, also wmo is quite cheap. Also thanks for the insulation link, that info is valuable!

Also the idea of using another heater on top of my reactor is starting to scare me too, so can i ask you how you heat your retort?

Now i can't decide on my heat exchanger design, and all the holidays aren't helping, it's closed everywhere and i still didn't found a proper lid, some parts are caught in postal offices.... well i guess i'l just have to wait untill the next year, also my welder won't work in the holidays, so you could say i'm on a forced break!

Thank you guys, all the best!