Two Basic Stages for Making Biodiesel

Clarification & Glycerol Removal

ABOUT BIODIESEL

For those of you who don't know: biodiesel is basically an alternative fuel meant as a replacement for conventional petroleum diesel fuel. Biodiesel is derived from an organic source, usually vegetable oil.

Surprisingly, most folks think biodiesel is "new" technology - when in fact it is more than 100 years old! For more details, read about it in this article.

For more info in general about biodiesel, read here.

CLEAN UP YOUR WASTE VEGETABLE OIL

Finding your raw vegg oil feedstock for casual home use is easy. Cleaning it is the hard part.

Cleaning your used vegetable oil feedstock is necessary to provide clean fuel that will not harm your engine, and will provide a smooth efficient (and preferably smokeless) burn. Cleaning the oil comes in two stages:

* Solids clarification

* Glycerol removal

Some discussion on these now...

SOLIDS CLARIFICATION

Whether you get "pure" or really dirty raw feedstock vegetable oil, you will need to remove the solids from it first. Otherwise, solids suspend in the raw fluid will clog up or contaminate the chemical media you use in the next step (glycerol removal), and solids will also clog your car's fuel filter for sure.

I do my solids removal in two stages.

Stage 1: I let the raw feedstock oil set for upwards of 2 or more weeks. This way, most if not all, of the large solid particles suspended in the raw oil fall to the bottom of the storage bottle (or barrel, tank, etc.).

Stage 2: After carefully pouring or sucking out the settled oil to a cleaner container, you can perform another stage of filtration that removes even smaller particles from the raw oil. This stage of filtration can be done with a mechanism such as Cris's greasecar filter or (my preference) with a centrifuge.

I have written more about centrifuges in biodiesel production here.

The centrifuge I use in my biodiesel production is shown in this article.