Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’ve been trying to pick up a gas chromatograph for a few months. I finally got a call today from a chemist I know, who has access to several HP 5890’s that a lab is liquidating. These are the same machines as used in the GC training I went to this summer. I"ve got a few options on where to set it up in the Bay Area, and am going to use it in a bunch of experiments to prove or disprove various ‘truisms’ in homebrew biodiesel.

There’s a thread on the yahoogroups biodiesel list right now, someone’s asking whether there are a few steps that homebrewers/small producers can take to improve their quality control to commercial-spec levels. I think I’m on the cusp of a lot of the answers to this one thanks to some work I did this summer which involved GC.

Anyway, I’m looking for suggestions on which column and which detector I’d need (I don’t have the ASTM test description at home here tonight). We apparently get “the pick” of several machines and there should be almost everything there to choose from.

Also, I’ve in the past heard from people offering to donate money to this project. I can pay for the machine but there’s quite a cost in setting it up (gas bottle rental, standards (ie pure chemicals used in the test), microliter syringes, and probably some odds and ends that I might initially miss at the lab sale)- so I’d be grateful for any money that can be donated towards this project. I wasn’t expecting to see this machine show up so soon, and I’ll write up a plan for the experimentation that I’m planning to use it for and post it here in a couple of days. I’d be using this machine for both nonprofit/open source work, and probably also for a commercial project with small producers/farmers which I"m starting to get off the ground.

please email me at alovert@b100.org if you have any suggestions for the equipment I’d need for the “total and free glycerol test” specifically.

Mark

Clark and his friends came up with a way to insert a heating element into a standpipe wash tank:
http://www.wvofuels.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/16/wash-tank-heater/ I really like his homebrew blog in general.

couple safety notes:

-You’ll probably want to at least goop over the terminals with silicone to prevent anyone accidentally grabbing the live wires, or fit a plastic electrical box over it somehow. I usually just weld a box onto a tank to make a heated wash tank, but that’s not the point of a weldless design like this one. Your electrical inspector or fire marshall might not be too happy about this.
-I have serious doubts about installing heating elements in plastic tanks, especially ones without a thermostat. But you can add this to a steel tank and shouldn’t have any problems. Thermostats can be mounted with zip ties and such, though they’re also a pair of live wire terminals and need to be covered with something to prevent someone touching them and zapping they-selves.

His article about this design is going to be the basis of a new Biodieselcommunity.org article about heating wash tanks in general- weldless rigging, welded boxes, good fish tank heaters and the like, and heat exchangers .

If anyone has photos of a heat exchanger in use this way, please let me know at alovert@ b100.org.

Mark

I sorta sloppily uploaded some photos of the Appleseed processor design that I’ve been doing for the past few months:

theyr’e here: http://www.localb100.com/appleseed2005/

I’ll put up an annotated version with notes about “what connects to whom and why” soon. Here’s the discussion thread about it at infopop’s Biodiesel Tutorial discussion section

Here’s another layout that accomplishes the same thing in one huge picture:
http://localb100.com/appleseed2005/alternate/lower%20biodiesel%20reactor%20plumbing.jpg

Mark

it never ends. Last night there was a flurry of email on the Machine Shop list about crap floating in the biodiesel tank. The biodiesel tank is full of fuel known to be in-spec this time. Apparently it has bacterial growths now after having left the tote lid cracked open for several months. There was also a nasty series of air-in-the-line incidents after our third Facet pump that pushes fuel from the storage tank to the genny’s injection pump died .

(this facet is a metal one, not the plastic cheapie job)

Again, my point is?… to dissuade some of you from taking ‘generator maintenance’ lightly and from falling into the trap of seeing generators as the easy answer to offgrid limitations.

In other news, after an insane amount of man-hours spent on troubleshooting many other new kinks in the system and in the context of our sulfation situation, The Investor wrote the following:

i’m learning to really not like batteries. and i’m learning that on a battery system with big inverters, the efficiency you want is not a big efficient generator that only runs for a short period of time each day, but rather a smaller one that can run for many hours at low power, quietly, ideally during the times you are using ac loads anyway, therefore bypassing the batteries in the process. it is our attempt at short charging cycle that makes the charge incomplete, as well as insures that most of the day is spent discharging the batteries while the generator is not running.

of course I disagree that a new small genny is appropriate to that particular place, as we (oops- they at this point, I’m not involved…) got a battery system in the first place to stop running a generator all day long, and there’s no such thing as a small quiet diesel genny as far as I know, and we have no predictable AC loads that happen on a schedule that you could plan charging around.

It’s like there’s just no easy answer to inefficient offgrid consumption , which is effectively what this experiment tried to do over there . Hippies with no offgrid experience go to Burning Man and come back thinking you can solve anythign with ‘just get a generator’ or ‘a few batteries’ , assume that the biodiesel or the SVO will suddenly make it all very cheap (aka ‘hippie bus’ syndrome)- but the day-to-day realities of the maintenance of an offgrid generator are really different than those of temporary use ones and it’s not even easy fix it by throwing money at the problem.

he later says:

i now see why all off-grid systems ultimately become a battle against the batteries. they are the most tempermental part of the system. and i now see the rest of the system should be designed with this fact in mind. system integration, balancing and interoperating motivation is more critical in this than i have often realized.

which I actually agree with. Whoa!

Mark

I’m starting to line up workshops for the next few months- I"m not sure that I"ll want to add any more other than in the Northwest.

Atlanta Ga
Salt Lake City UT
Berlin MD
Houston Tx

It’s not clear yet which one is when exactly…

Mark

well that was quick- within about 8 hours of writing that post I got a cheap diesel van. The truck is going!

Mark

I did two classes in Seattle in the past month. The first one was in mid-october , and we had three times as much interest as we had space. We scheduled a second class for ’spillover’ registrants two weeks later and that one generated twice as many inquiries as we had space. Some of it is gas prices related and some of it is probably due to us all having reached a ‘critical mass’ whereby the general public has all heard about this stuff by now so there’s just too much interest to go around.

For the first class I drove to Seattle with the boyfriend and his van, and became completely ’sold’ on the idea of doing this with vans in the future- it was so nice having the RV setup after doing my 10,000 miles last fall with the cramped single-cab brown truck.

The rainy season has started here in Northern California- so I’m looking for a van of my own and selling my king cab 86 Ford truck effective immediately. I dont want to go through another winter with an open-bed pickup truck when I"m not working heavy construction.

I own ‘the perfect trailer’ (5 by 8 with a superstructure for tie-downs , and reasonably heavy suspension), so I can fit anything onto my trailer that I might otherwise need an open-top truckbed for.

*****

The second ‘added’ class that was two weeks later, I actually flew up for and rented a car (it was completely shocking to drive a cheapo gasoline Hyundai with acceleration after driving a cheapo VW Rabbit for the last few months!).

I bought all new plastic labware that didn’t weigh as much as my former glassware, fit all the liter batch labware into a suitcase, and let the airline Homeland Security inspectors make what they could of it during their inspection. (note: a special thanks to B100supply.com for unearthing great prices for a few things that made this possible, such as the $36 super-accurate pocket scale- I bought four of these to get rid of the last labware ‘bottleneck’ in class- they’re a lot easier to pack than the triple beam scales I"ve previously used in classes, and his prices on them are a lot cheaper than the ones I"d previously seen anywhere).

Once there I rented a car and drove around for a day picking up the flammables and additional large stuff that I didn’t bring on the plane. I found time to go bother Chris at Frybrid and gossip about SVO for a few hours that day even.

Lyle R. of the Northwest Biofuels Network and Noam of Breathable Bus Coalition, who teach high school and adult classes about this stuff, helped with oil and a couple of samples of biodiesel and a few other items (Lyle had arranged this class and the wonderful community center classroom location!), and I later passed on some of the class equipment to them (like titration supplies ). Students brought plastic bottles for reactors, and a few brought samples of oil. It was extremely easy. Afterwards I stayed for 4 more days and visited biodieselers in Portland and many old friends in Olympia and Seattle and had an indescribably fabulous time.

I think I can even teach a ‘fly-in’ workshop in the future that involves a small welded processor if I have shop access for a half day before- fly in with processor plumbing already assembled, buy a brand new RV-size 8-gallon propane tank at Lowes, and weld up a few ports to add the plumbing to- then sell it locally to cover costs before flying back home. This might be a little bit much to ask in midwinter when I expect to do this tour and when backyard welding venues are unavailable, but we’ll see what turns up. I’ve been mostly teaching without a processor since last spring anyway especially for one-day classes.

So… I’m now looking to plan some workshops out of state again (for a while I wasnt willing to plan any, until I"d replaced the original brown Ford with the current red king cab one). It’s winter, I know, but I think I can fly out to the East Coast or the Southwest, affordably rent a (gas of course- gasp!) car for two weeks and get a lot of ‘visiting’ in in between teaching some classes.

This is a fundraiser for my nefarious plans to get a good diesel van someday ($??) and a gas chromatograph soon ($2K).

What I"m looking for are folks in cities with biodiesel homebrewing interest who can help me locate/negotiate a classroom space- community center classrooms, etc, or someone’s shop space or garage.

above and below: We had a ‘guest lecturer’ at the 15th’s class- “johnO from the infopop biodiesel discussion forum brought some innovative equipment to show.

We’ve done a few workshops in conference rooms and carpeted spaces- they’re not messy if we’re not building processors- so there are a lot of possibilities for types of rooms that are usable as long as they’re warm enough for people to spend a 7-hour class, mostly sitting, in them.

If we’re building processors we’d need shop or garage space but I’m not tied to doing those anymore as they take a huge amount of energy on my part to organize and run.

-I’d take it from there and run registration so it’s not a burden on you or the local group
-I’d fly in a couple of days before and do the shopping runaround / help you with your backyard system/etc. If you have shop access I can probably even build a portable table-top processor for use in the class.
-Another goal of mine in traveling to teach is to gauge the ‘pulse’ of what’s happening in grassroots biodiesel ’round the country, so I really want to visit co-ops, small business biodiesel, and similar projects.

- the contact info is alovert at b100 dot org

Mark

Last week I finally braved the Urgent Care department at the county hospital-= yep, I"ve no health insurance of course. I spent 9 hours in the waiting room with half of East Oakland’s obese population and a few smelly and wingnutty homeless people, watching my $10 in change disappear into the junkfood machine as I didnt’ bring dinner, and finally got my hand looked at which in itself was a two-hour process or somethin’. It turns out I tore a ligament, the one that controls grip. EEEWEWWW, gross, ick!. I’m now in a splint (a removable ‘cast’ basically) with my right hand unusable for a few weeks. Of course I went untreated for about 6 weeks before finally going to the doctor and had moved my entire shop during that time, so I hope (pray?) I regain normal mobility after this self-abuse!!! The agonising 9 hour waiting room experience reminded me of why I was so reluctant to go.

I can “kind of” type since my main fingers are unaffected, but the cast makes it quite clumsy, especially since it’s on my wrist and I can’t rotate my hand comfortably into normal typing position. I ordered an ergonomic keyboard after test-driving a couple of them that belong to the boyfriend’s ex?girlfriend, which should make typing a bit easier. It’s driving me nuts not being able to type fast and not being able to do anything else with my hands to occupy my time. I was in the new shop tonight, staring longingly at some of my new tools, wondering how long it’ll be before I can do some of the exciting projects on my plate.

I also took some of this as a wake-up call of sorts- I’ve known for years about the problems with my hypermobile joints and known I"ve gotta do some serious strength training to compensate. Last month when I was doing the ‘dear gods,dont let this be the beginning of crippled hands too’ dance, I was swearing up and down about recommitting myself to doing some injury prevention work this time, Lyme exhaustion or no. I’ve also decided to take a look at safer typing ergonomics, before I wind up with the wrist injuries that plague my computer-user friends.

I was also overjoyed to finally learn what my other ‘RSI’ injury is- I was misdiagnosed with tendinitis a few years ago after another sports injury to my elbow which has sidelined me from serious carpentry work ever since. That time I was in the throes of Lyme disability and the only health care I had access to was community health clinic staffed by young residents with too many patients- the diagnosis consisted of ‘you have tendinitis of some sort, take ibuprophen and hope it goes away’. The sports massage guy a few years later clued me in that this wasn’t the right diagnosis. This time the older and experienced doctor poked at my elbow for about 60 seconds and wrote down the name of another ligament I seem to have torn. When I looked it up on Google, the description of it (it’s a rare type of injury) fit my circumstances almost exactly to the letter. At least I can do something about fixing that- tendinitis is a tougher thing to deal with (I think) than what I apparently have. I"ve seen people with similar injuries make miraculous recoveries through strength training, though, so I’m pretty ecstatic to find I was misdiagnosed.

Since the vertical keyboard I’m getting is going to require me to really focus on relearning touch-typing (no peeking at the keyboard possible with this radical design), I’m also going to work on learning Dvorak keyboard layoutlayout which I’ve wanted to pick up, so I ordered a set of stick-on Dvorak layout letters for one of my ‘normal’ shape keyboards to see if I can wrap the brain around that too. I"m not sure it’ll all help during the relatively short timeframe while I’ve got the cast on my wrist , but it seems as good a time as any to start using these improvements.

Anyone know a good physical therapist in my town (no chiropractors, please, I have good access to those already and I"m looking for a ‘conventional’ PT here)? email is alovert at b100 (dot ) org

Mark