How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[jonathan]

retort,reflux,condensor

ok thanks my friend it is welded very well l have to make last condensor and bubbler and try it with water because right know l have family proplems thanks for everyone who help me.. how much water l want to put in retort?

[mjohnson1]

ok thanks my friend it is welded very well l have to make last condensor and bubbler and try it with water because right know l have family proplems thanks for everyone who help me.. how much water l want to put in retort?

When you finish your last condenser and bubbler fill your retort with only water and see if there are any leaks. Make sure your bubbler is filled with water when you do this since the bubbler will exert a pressure requirement on the retort.

Even if your welds look good there may be tiny holes that are hard to see.

When you run your retort with plastic add 1/4th a liter as water expands when it turns to steam. This will purge your system like Beyond Biodiesel said.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Good suggestions mjohnson1. I hope imakebiodiesel is OK, because normally we would be hearing from him. Pyrolysis is dangerous stuff, so when a regular drops off I often wonder if they are OK.

Any way, mjohnson1, good to know that you have a bubbler. Presumably you are going to be using water to cool one or more condensers. I rout the condenser water through my bubbler to make sure it is full of water at all times, and the water is kept fresh, because it can acidify rapidly if there is any chlorinated hydrocarbons in your retort.

[Allcanadian]

@mjohnson

The easiest thing to do in my opinion is obtain some CO2 or nitrogen and use it as a purge gas.

I believe the easiest and cheapest purge gas is steam which would also preheat the system and would be driven off before the combustible gasses. As well if anyone is worried about a blowback then a blast door could be used. This is basically like a safety valve and a big check valve with a heavier spring set above the working pressure can be used as well.

AC

[jonathan]

safety

if l understand l want valve that be opened whit retort pressure can l make two bubblers ? when l was working on hho and there is little gas left and suck back the last bubbler only explode

[waterboost]

Serious Disaster Avoided

did a run the other day with mixed ground plastic... 5 kg went in...

about 200ml of liquid fuel and 1 litre of water came out... lots of gas???

when the liquid stopped dripping we turned it off...

when it cooled we opened the reactor and noticed white shiny crystals???

opened the reflux and it was packed solid with white crystals???

opened the first condenser and yes... more white crystals...

they burn v.slowly and are v.energy dense?

What craziness have we created this time???

we did a test with the plastic (floating it) and it was full of unidentifiables (PET, PVC, ABS, etc....) so from now on we will be floating all our plastic...

[Beyond Biodiesel]

did a run the other day with mixed ground plastic... 5 kg went in...

about 200ml of liquid fuel and 1 litre of water came out... lots of gas???

when the liquid stopped dripping we turned it off...

when it cooled we opened the reactor and noticed white shiny crystals???

opened the reflux and it was packed solid with white crystals???

opened the first condenser and yes... more white crystals...

they burn v.slowly and are v.energy dense?

What craziness have we created this time???

Sorry, I have not seen, nor heard of any white, shiny, energy dense, crystals. I cannot imagine what it is, other than salt, or aluminum, but salt and aluminum are not energy dense.

we did a test with the plastic (floating it) and it was full of unidentifiables (PET, PVC, ABS, etc....) so from now on we will be floating all our plastic...

If you are going to process halogenated hydrocarbons, such as PVC and ABS, then you will want to make sure that you have a very effective bubbler system, your bubbler is packed with rusty steel wool, your vent is far away from any person or animal, and your final gas is incinerated.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

PS:
Your operators must have full-face respirators with filters that can filter out hydrogencynide, hydrogenflouride, hydrogenchloride gasses and hydrogensulfide gasses.

You must have two operators at all times, and one must be a safe distance away and next to a phone so that emergency personal can be called if the first operator collapses due to emissions of the above gases.

Your second operator must also have a way to shut off the heat of your pyrolysis unit at hand and a safe distance from the pyrolysis unit.

[waterboost]

Weird White Stuff

The picture below shows the top of the reflux (which was at 140degrees C) when we turned it off

[Beyond Biodiesel]

If you are going to crack hydrocarbons then you need to keep the first reflux at the temperature of the cracking unit; otherwise you will get a plug, as you showed above. DO not try to do too much at each stage. Instead think lots of stages not few stages in refluxing and condensing.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

My guess is one of the main reasons why regulars drop off this thread is they end up with a plugged reflux, like above, it blows up their retort, and if it does not kill them, or put them in jail for causing death and/or injury to others, then they are hopefully too scared to try making another pyrolysis unit, because a plugged retort will make a big boom when it goes.

[waterboost]

How very dare you?

I consider that an insult....

I think one of the reasons people drop of this thread is they cant be bothered to do things properly... or they are busy and have moved on...

A picture of a plugged reflux (3" wide) on a 50litre reactor should be a warning to those using 1" pipe... Pressure gauges cost v.little and we have two blow off valves, which despite the blockage have never gone off...

My intuition is better than my safety equipment

[mjohnson1]

Pyrolysis of plastics is relatively safe if you feed hdpe, ldpe, pp only. A simple sink/float tank is all that's needed to test plastics. I've never ran into problems using every plastic that floats in water.

I believe your blockage is caused by something in your feedstock which you already said you knew. With the appropriate catalyst you can process many more types of plastics.

[mercedes 308]

does anyone of you guys know if plastic from farm use can be used? i think about the plastik from bale wrap. black and green plastic. or can anyone tell me what it's made of?

LLDPE#4
Agricultural films
(silage bags, greenhouse films, wraps for hay bales)
Note:
Because agricultural films often come in contact with the ground
or most farm products, many recyclers currently reject this material due
to contamination. Chemicals and paint used for UV protection are other
contaminants often found on agricultural films


http://www.plasticbagrecycling.org/02.0/Worksheet1.pdf

[greenpower37]

plastic to diesel

DearJetijs,

Greetings from south sudan .Can i get yr email ..cel..we are keen on plastic to diesel as we have daily acess to 2 mt cleaned plastic shrrrreded scrap which comprises of pet /hdpe /ldpe mostly.we are doing it maily to keeo city clean.can to kindl;y let me know if you can offer us a bigger machine please.A reply shall be highly appreciated best
kogikap@gmail.com;123454]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[/QUOTE]