Clemson Sustainable Biofuels

Thanks Brioso

clemsonbiofuels — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:34:54 +0000

Our conscience was at ease knowing that the fried mozzeralla sticks we were eating were reducing our carbon footprint!

Just wanted to say a quick thank you to managers Christie and Tyler from Brioso. We had about 40 faculty, staff and students come out over the course of the night to dine at Brioso. We loved the food, and we love that you folks have partnered with us. As our program continues to grow, we need to continue to find great partners like Brioso to join our efforts. If you have a restaurant in mind, please leave us a comment so we can follow up.

Grease Appreciation Night is Wednesday, Nov. 2nd!

clemsonbiofuels — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:10:11 +0000

Hello supporters of Clemson Sustainable Biofuels! If you live in the Clemson area, we will be having our Grease Appreciation night at Brioso tomorrow night (Wednesday, Nov. 2nd) from 5-8pm. Please come out and support Brioso who supports Clemson Sustainable Biofuels, by donating their used oils to us. Each gallon of oil that is recycled into biodiesel saves 20 pounds of carbon going into our ever warming atmosphere. Hooray! Hope to see you at Brioso and check back soon for more grease appreciation nights with our other local supporters.

Soap Batch #1 = Success!

clemsonbiofuels — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:24:19 +0000

Dex and I made a batch of soap about a month back and it has been curing all this time. I finally pulled it out this morning, took it to the sink, turned on the water and….voila! Bubbles! It lathered up really nicely and rinsed (mostly) cleanly. It took a bit more rinsing than soap I’m used to, but its a start. For our first batch, I am very proud. The ingredients for this soap were recovered glycerin from our biodiesel reactor, chinese tallow oil, sunflower oil, potassium hydroxide and a bit of tea tree oil. You can’t really smell the tea tree in the final product (maybe we didn’t use enough or maybe it evaporated). But it does leave your skin feeling clean and not drying at all. It isn’t the prettiest soap, and looks more like butterscotch brownies or some kind of peanut butter bar, and isn’t super homogenous, but its functional and that is what we were going for! Next up, we have purchased some new soap making materials, including French Green clay, coconut oil, some citric acid (to experiment with neutralizing the glycerin), lime oil for scent, and buckwheat hulls which we will grind up to use as an abrasive for those really dirty jobs. The agricultural mechanic lab is right next to ours (read: working on tractor engines) so we can deliver some to them I think the issue with the current batch was that we did not mix it thouroughly enough after adding the base to the oils. We used a wire whisk and may experiment in the future with an emersion blender. Stay tuned for more soap tales from the biodiesel lab!!

Algae Farming 101

clemsonbiofuels — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:13:57 +0000

By: Shwetha Sivakaminathan and Lauren Harroff

Last week we had the opportunity to attend a workshop at the UTEX Culture Collection of Algae located at the University of Texas in Austin. Algae include a very diverse range of organisms with differing sizes, shapes, colors and structural components. Microalgae fall into two broad categories: Cyanobacteria or Blue-green algae and Eukaryotic algae or true algae.

Outside the Culture Collection

The UTEX Culture Collection contains approximately 3,000 different strains of living algae, representing most major algal taxa. The workshop we attended focused on managing algae cultures, sterile culture techniques, basic biology of algae, and measuring growth—all important subjects for algal biofuels. We were able to tour the impressive collection, listen to lectures, and even try out the techniques ourselves. Below is just a sample of some of the things we learned:

Lauren practices pulling Pasteur pipettes into tiny micropippetes to isolate single cells for creating axenic cultures.

Some of the common terminologies used for microalgae are:

Culture (noun): A population of living microorganisms that is maintained away from its natural habitat under a set of conditions that is (to at least some extent) controlled.

Culture (verb): The process of maintaining and/or managing a culture.

Unialgal culture: A culture that contains one and only one kind of algae. It may contain other non-algal microorganisms.

Axenic culture (pure culture): A culture that contains only a single kind of microorganism.
Anaxenic culture of an alga would not contain any bacterial contaminants.

Species: A population of living microorganisms that is very similar as determined especially by their DNA sequences, but also by other characteristics. (The species we use is Chlorella protothecoides)

Strain: A population of living microorganisms, all of which were isolated from the same location at the same time, and all of which are virtually identical according to their DNA sequences. (The strain we use is Chlorella protothecoides UTEX 256.)

Subculturing: (Passaging or Transferring) A subculture is a new culture made by transferring some fraction of cells from a previous culture to fresh growth medium. Sub culturing is used to establish long term cell cultures and/or expand the number of cells in the culture.

Algae cultures are maintained either on agar slants or as liquid cultures depending on the nature of the strain. The incubator and storage rooms for all are maintained at room temperature of around 20 degrees C.

Most of the fresh water and soil algae that need to be stored for a long period of time go into cryopreservation i.e. storage in liquid nitrogen (below -196C). Cryopreservation minimizes maintenance cost, reduces space requirements, diminishes risk of contamination and prevents genetic changes.

Biosystems Engineers Do It in the Dark!

clemsonbiofuels — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:45:56 +0000

Ah ha, I think I found our new slogan for department t-shirts! One of our main research topics here at Clemson is production of lipid from algae. Dr. Terry Walker and pHd candidate Jen-Hui Chen (Dec 2011) have been creating a method for growing algae in a heterotrophic environment to produce higher lipid contents. Heterotrophic means that un-like an autotrophic system (perfroming photosynthesis and deriving energy from sunlight and CO2), our system grows in the dark. This dark growth algae then derives its energy from a liquid substrate. In our scenario, we feed crude biodiesel glycerol to the algae.

In this photo, Shwetha Sivakaminathon, a current biosystems MS student, has scaled up the results of Walker and Chen’s production system into a 7 litre production system. Learn more by reading Walker and Chen’s recent publication here: heterotrophic algae[1]

With this method we are able to acheive lipid contents greater than 60%. Higher lipid content in algae significantly improves the economics of oil extraction from algae. Over the next year we will continue to scale up this production system to CSTR’s, Raceways and Plug Flow Reactors as we search for an economical solution to algae oil production. With support from Clemson University Facilities, we will implement this system beyond the pilot scale to produce more lipids to make more biodiesel for the university fleet. We will also be researching the properties of the residual algae biomass for improved efficiencies in biomass gassification. biogasificationposter[1]

Croc’s in Downtown Clemson, our newest Supporter

clemsonbiofuels — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:30:55 +0000

Thanks to the crew down at Croc’s for partnering with the Clemson Sustainable Biofuels initiative! We wish them the best in their new venture in Tiger Town. Croc’s offers a huge selection of wings and draft beers, as well as live music in downtown Clemson. Check them out this Saturday after homecoming for music from Cravin Melon.

Corey Benson, of the Clemson Sustainable Biofuels creative inquiry program is pictured here with Mathew, kitchen manager and kind giver of the grease. When you stop in be sure to thank them for partnering with Clemson Sustainable Biofuels! Stay tuned for an announcement of a grease appreciation night in early December to thank Croc’s for supporting our program. Once a month we will be highlighting one of our partners. On this day we will gather for food and libations to thank these local businesses for their support. This is an idea we’ve borrowed from our friends at Piedmont Biofuels
www.biofuels.coop

Stay Tuned!

Habitat for Humanity Going Green On Campus

clemsonbiofuels — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:28:01 +0000

Well, the build is under way! After a morning collecting used cooking oil from our Death Valley stadium and HUGE win over Florida State, Anne, Kait, Steven and I headed back to home base to unload our grease and load our mobile 5kw generator over to the Folks at Habitat for Humanity who were excited to use our locally produced biodiesel to build the annual Habitat house here on campus.

From 8am-5pm this little gennie purs running on B100 and powering tablesaws, circular saws, battery charges and anything else requiring power for the build. Over the next week we will also be fueling the light towers and generators supplied by United Rentals for our homecoming float building and celebration. We will be fueling this equipment with a blend of 20% biodiesel and 80% diesel fuel.

It’s Soapa time!

clemsonbiofuels — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:16:45 +0000

Holly and Dex have redemption. Through our Creative Inquiry course on value added coproducts from glycerol, we finally have some useful soap coming down the line. Our first batch looked like failed batch of brownies. But alas, we retooled, enhanced our quality control and anlytics, and today Holly cut the soap into bars to cure. This soap is made from glycerol that we refined in our lab to remove free fatty acids, remove methanol, remove water, filter to 30 micron, and adjust to a pH of 7. We then pressed some Chinese Tallow Seed and Sunflower Seeds to make up the rest of the oil for our batch. Some teatree oil was also used for providing fragrance.

The bars are a brownish color and smell fantastic. It will be a few weeks before we can begin using these bars, but in the meantime we will be refining our recipe and making molds to shape our soaps. Tiger Paw soap anyone?

From Downtown Fryers to the Clemson Fleet!

clemsonbiofuels — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:52:06 +0000

CU Sustainability Partners!As we roar into summer, we have our first downtown Clemson restaurants ready to donate their grease to our mission for sustainability. Walker Massey of C.U. Economic Development helped us with this design and we love it! This week we’ll be delivering a 250 gallon grease dumpster to DaWaat Indian Cuisine on Keith St. We’re excited to support DaWaat in this partnership and we look forward to supporting them by dining at their fine restaurant. I hope you folks will too! And tell them thank you for choosing to recycle their used cooking oil to our local sustainability project! The C.U. campus will be much cleaner for their contribution.

Clemson Sustainable Biofuels Showcase

clemsonbiofuels — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:47:47 +0000

As the sun prepared to set Friday evening, Holly Garret and I put together a quick video and project summary for the Discovery Channel.

We explained how we use off grid renewable energy to power our process, and we focus on the environmentally favorable non-food feedstock for biodiesel and ethanol production. For those of you who don’t know, our analytics lab is 70% off grid thanks to the Photovoltaic Solar array that Dr. Terry Walker was able to purchase and install for us. We also have a solar hot water panel awaiting installation to provide our heat for vegetable oil settling and moisture removal.

Our Mobile Biodiesel Production Lab is 100% off grid and powered by B100 made by myself with the help of our dedicated students. We have also plumbed the generator to capture waste heat that we then divert to heat our process. Using the generator for both electricity and heat is referred to Co-generation, and co-generation is part of every sustainable energy system involving combustion.

We also discussed our research involving algae cultivation. Specifically our goal of creating a plug flow photobioreactor to mount onto combustion engines. This bioreactor will capture CO2 emissions produced during combustion, and feed it back to the algae. By the time the algae reaches the end of the bioreactor we will be able to harvest it for oil (to make biodiesel!) and biomass pellets for testing as a feedstock for gassification.

Ultimately we’d like to install a gassifier on campus for steam and electricity production and capture emissons for the exhaust to feed our algae cultivators, that will in turn provide us with biodiesel feedstock and feedstock for our gassifier.

One of the issues with gassification is the transportation of the feedstock. It is currently not a favorable energy balance due to the energy involved in processing, pelletizing and transporting forest products to feed gassifiers. Algae has the potential to improve this energy balance because it is a feedstock that can be generated on-site with significantly less acrage than forest products.