It’s Soapa time!

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!

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

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.

Summer Brewing with Dexter

Thanks to the amazing Creative Inquiries program at C.U. we were able to fund an undergrad over the summer to help run our 90 gallon per week biodiesel processor here on Campus. Dexter Pearson is a rising Biosystems Engineering  junior and participated in the C.I. program this spring. He was a great student and always stayed late or came in for extra hours because he was genuinely interested in the process. Now after a month of running the plant together, Dexter is autonomous.

I feel our lab is in good hands and I know that the biodiesel produced for the CU Facilities fleet will meet the highest quality specifications with Dexter at the helm.

Recent activities include oilseed crushing for soap production. Dexter crushed about 10 lbs of chinese tallow seed and 15 lbs of sunflower seed to give us some high quality oil for converting our glycerol co-product into soap. We purchased the soapmaking handbook “Journey Into Soapmaking” from theabundancefoundation.org because it specifically details how to use biodiesel glycerin for high quality soap making. With our first successful batch soon coming off the line, we hope to plan for a Fall Creative Inquiry to make different soaps such as detergents, dishsoap, laundry soap and garden scrubs from our glorious co-products.

50% by weight oil and waxes! That's perfect for soap!

Summer Oil Collection

By Holly Garret

Now that school is out for the summer, Clemson’s cafeterias aren’t nearly at the oil volume as during the year.  We’ve been doing some outreach to a few places in downtown Clemson which will hopefully prove fruitful and get us back running a few batches a week.  As part of my Master’s research, I’m also doing a feasibility study just to see how much waste oil is produced in Clemson on a given week.  (Of course, this will fluctuate throughout the year, as football season and students come and go.)  But a rough estimate is what I want right now.  I’ve started contacting all the restaurants in the Clemson area and talking with the managers or owners about how much oil they use a week.  Again this is a rough estimate, as most of them are telling me how much they USE, rather than how much they DUMP after its been used (which is the stuff we’d want to use).  I am meeting today with TD’s and he is going to give me both figures, how much they buy and how much is collected by Carolina Byproducts, their waste oil contractor.  This way I can get a rough percentage of how much is lost in the frying process.  2%? 5%?   Another technical kink is that most places receive containers which weigh 35 pounds.  This is not gallons and to figure it out, I’d need to know what type of oil it was and its density.  I may need to go back and ask those places what type of oil it was.   I hope to have this data by the end of the summer, compiled with all the assumptions checked out.

Biodiesel in the CAT Buses

Why not? For the first time in recent history biodiesel and biodiesel blends are actually less expensive than petroleum diesel fuel. A blend of B5 is compatible with any diesel engine type, and most engines are approved for use up to B20. Just a little biodiesel goes a long way to improve emissions by reducing CO2 and unburned hydrocarbons, while also boosting Cetane value and adding lubricity. If you want to see biodiesel in our CAT bus fleet, please write to
Keith Moody [KMoody@cityofclemson.org] and say “Biodiesel in the CAT bus please” in the title.

Full Scale Cotton Ethyl Esters

Apologies for the fuzzy photo, but this scene was too good to miss. Kirby and Cynthia are draining the glycerin from the cottonseed oil ethyl esters. Because ethanol is less polar than traditionally used methanol, it tends to dissolve in both the biodiesel and glycerin layers, making separation very difficult!

I have encountered this lack of separation before through labs at Central Carolina Community College. However, this time I took a cue from recent PhD graduate of Clemson Him Joshi. From his experiments with cottonseed oil ethyl esters, he recommended a 50/50 blend of ethanol and methanol, and the methanol will assist in phase separation between the glycerol and esters.

Well, unfortunately after 24 hours and centrifuge, we had no glycerol separation. Plus, the pesky pigments in the cottonseed oil make telling the two phases apart very tricky!

This led us to a series of experiments!!! We prepared four samples, a) blank, b) add 5% water, c) add 5% 1NH2SO4, and d) add 5% glycerol. Each tube was then centrifuged at 1800rpm for 5 minutes. The best separation occurred with the addition of water.

Why? The residual ethanol in solution dissolves in the water, which is highly polar. This solution also dissolves in the glycerol, and the glycerol, water, ethanol mix settle to the bottom.

It is important to limit water to 5%, or else we can create a more severe emulsion resulting from the creation of soaps.

Ethyl Esters offer better lubricity, higher btu content, and improved cold flow characteristics over Methyl Esters. Additionally, using ethanol in place of methanol enables a 100% renewable domestic fuel, whereas methanol is still fossil fuel derived.

Creative Inquiries

The Creative Inquiries Program (http://www.clemson.edu/academics/programs/creative-inquiry/) at Clemson is one of my favorite programs. Partially because I get to teach one of the courses, but also because unlike the stale traditional academic classroom environment, the C.I. program puts students into the field. From building anaerobic digesters to sustainable design within the Clemson Organic Farm to students from Nutritional Sciences creating cookbooks for using local seasonal vegetables. Anyway, the ideas were stirring and the presentations were great.

A great idea brewed while conversing with Kelley and Geoff from the Organic Farm. We can grow organic sunflower and crush the seed for oil to sell on-farm as well as using it in one of the campus fryers. From the fryer, we then get to pick it up and turn it back into fuel which is used by all diesel vehicles on campus. Additionally, our organic sunflower meal can be fed back into poultry on farm.

These are the ideas we’ve been pushing in Chatham County, NC via Piedmont Biofuels (www.biofuels.coop) and Central Carolina Community College (CCCC.edu). CCCC has taken it even a step further not just growing, crushing and cooking with it, but they have students in their Natural Chef Program use it to design gourmet sustainable food served the school restaurant.

At the end of this post you can check out our poster presentation to the Creative Inquiries Forum.

Also! we’ve just added a link on the Biosystems Engineering website (http://www.clemson.edu/cafls/departments/biosystemseng/). If you like and want to support our efforts, you can now make a contribution!

FOCI[3]

Flashing

Finally, we’ve got our closed-cup flashpoint tester fully commissioned. Karris here is demonstrating flash on a finished biodiesel sample. The flash point was higher than 93C which indicates that we’ve recovered all the methanol from our finished fuel. This prevents precombustion or “knocking” in diesel engines, and permits the finished product to be classified as non-flammable, therefore enabling easy storage and transportation.

After a short bout with an algae bloom in our terminal tank, we are back into full production. A 60 gallon batch from cotton seed oil and waste vegetable oil is currently running through ion exchange and final filtration. Also, Friday’s batch from WVO is currently undergoing methanol recovery. Jovan and I are anxiously awaiting the completion of the methanol recovery so we can test flash point again!

Karris Roland tests Flash Point on finished fuel

The Cotton Experiments

Kiah Baker measures KOH for our transesterification of Unrefined Cottonseed Oil

Today is our first of five batches processing Unrefined Cottonseed Oil from Cotton Inc. We will produce five batch of ASTM quality fuel, and assess the fuel qualities, cold flow characteristics, as well as track where an inherent antioxidant, gossypol, resides after the reaction. Time permitting, we will perform additional reactions with ethanol in place of methanol to compare cold flow properties and gossypol accumulation. Extraction of this gossypol could prove valuable for oxidative stability additves as well as medicinal uses as a contraceptive, anti HIV and anti Cancer drug.

With the help of Holly, Kiah and Allie I was able to fully react two 30 gallon batches of cottonseed oil. Tomorrow we will take samples of the biodiesel and glycerin phases for analysis of gossypol content.