Posted: 6/17/2004 7:53:49 AM EDT
patriotnetwork.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19969
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I wouldn't try it. |
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Google is your friend: Biodiesel facts
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| Diesel(the invernter of the engine) thought that the future of his engine was in using vegatable oil, not petrol so I'd say that Bio-Diesel(the proper name for vegatable oil diesel) could be one of the future energy souces that is used in automobiles. Personally, I think the Hydrogen Fuel Cell is the true wave of the future. The Earth is 70% water, the main ingredent needed to extract H for Fuel Cell fuel. The by-product is H2O so it's very clean. I can see OPEC and their ilk fighting like mad to stop this technology because it'll end their business. I really don't think we've got much of a choice, oil is running out, another 50 years or so and it'll be all gone and we'll have to have a different form of energy in place or we'll all end up walking. |
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Fuel cells certainly are interesting. But to somehow conclude that "because water is plentiful and water is composed of hydrogen.. then, geee, we have plenty of fuel" is waaay off the mark. To separate the hydrogen from the oxygen takes energy. In fact, it takes more energy than you get when you turn around and burn the hydrogen if your fuel-cell driven car. So, to run more fuel cells, we will need more power plants of some sort (coal and nuclear probably are the most cost-effective megawatt producers). |
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It's all a matter of how much energy it takes to produce the fuel vs. how much energy you get out of it. It takes energy to raise the crops you get the vegetable oil from (fuel, fertilizer). It takes fuel to process the vegetable oil and make biodiesel out of it. The return on biodiesel is a LOSS in energy. It takes more joules to produce biodiesel than you can get back out of it. Same problem with using solar to make hydrogen. The energy density of sunlight on the earth is pretty damned low. The conversion efficiency of sunlight into electricity for cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen is lower. Then it takes energy to put that hydrogen into a useful form. The return is TOO LOW - we cannot use sunlight to produce hydrogen for fuel cells because there simply isn't enough sunlight to produce a useful amount of hydrogen. The energy density of petroleum and the ease of recovering it are what make it a viable fuel. Same for natural gas. Steven Den Beste recently wrote several pieces on this topic. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and work your way up. Check the links, too. He's right. |
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I've heard that biodiesel cars smell like french fries, so if you don't mind that smell, or smelling like you work at a fast food restaurant then I guess it's ok. Another bad thing about biodiesel is that if you live in colder climates the vegetable oil gets too thick and the motor won't run. That means that you need to have another power source to heat the fuel to minimum operating temperature, further reducing it's efficiency. |
A small radiator mounted in the fuel cell heats the fuel with the engine coolant. Before shut down you run diesel throught the feed lines and injection pump to make sure you can restart. Solenoid fuel valves do the selection of fuel feed. Check GREASEL.COM. |
| With biodiesel taking more to make than it produces, we're back to square one. We have some buses running on it here in Indy. If they could improve the process a bit I wonder if it would be worth it. What amount of pollution does a biodiesel put out anyway? A lot? Not much? None? |
Cool, that would work. |
Some of the older .mil engines were multi fuelers, designed to run on a long list of things. You normally ran diesel, but iirc you could run damn near anything short of water. |
yup, they'll run on pretty much everything except for 100LL |
Yeah, those White multi-fuels were a great engineering success....Veg Oil works fine in an unmodified diesel in warmer weather, but only as an emergency fuel...otherwise you have to mess with pre-heating, larger feed injectors, messing with the govenor, etc. But a diesel WILL run on vegetable oils (at least in the short term). |
If you're talking about me, that statement is false. I didn't know it, and actually still don't "know" it, because I haven't seen it done. 
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