Diary of a Mad Scientist

I am teaching an Advanced Topics class in Concord, CA (SF Bay Area suburbs) on Sat-Sun April 18-19, with a one-day optional Introduction To Biodiesel Production class the day before on Friday, Apr 17th:
Registration info will be posted at www.girlmark.com/tour shortly

working with high-free-fatty-acid oil

working with high-water feedstocks

acidulating glycerine and wash water for easier disposal and cost savings

testing biodiesel, glycerine, and wash water for soap

producing biodiesel from oils recovered from glycerine

acid-catalyzed esterification options

methanol recovery from biodiesel (GL-1 process) and glycerine.

using glycerine as a solvent in various stages of the process

There will be an extensive hands-on section of the class devoted to techniques for making biodiesel using ethanol instead of methanol, and we will discuss small-scale fuel ethanol production.

We will also discuss water-free soap removal such as the use of the GL-1 process and ion exchange resins.

Registration info will be posted at www.girlmark.com/tour shortly

I’ve been traveling like a madman this month. I started off Jan 1st by flying to Oakland to start dealing with my crosscountry move. I’m halfway through the required organizing and sellings-off and so forth. I had a class in Ohio last weekend, and had a fairly major health crash due to moving, and didn’t get done with the moving hell.

I flew back to RDU, drove home in time to pack for class and sleep, drove a gasoline car to the Ohio class 6 hours away, taught class, explored West Virginia a little on the way home, drove the gasoline car back south to my long-time friends’ house on the NC-Virginia line, spent a couple of days there decompressing with these ‘family’, headed to Pittsboro to unload the class crap, saw my room for all of 20 minutes, got on another Jet-A fossil-fueled plane and headed back across country to Oakland. It was snowing in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pittsboro. It was snow-free in Mt Airy but 10 degrees F, where I was sandwiched between snowy drives.

And I’m now in California again. I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, my luck will bring me that disposable truck I’m looking for- which would mean that I’ll be driving my shop stuff across country in the middle of early Febuary winter weather. I found myself walking across an overheated Southern California airport on a layover, carrying my winter insulated coveralls and a winter coat shoved into a stuff sack (I’m traveling without checked baggage these days, since this travel is more like going from one home to the next rather than taking a trip that requires bringing anything). I had to bring the gigantic winter gear in case I’m driving an 80’s Ford on a crosscountry winter wonderland adventure next month. More than once in the last two weeks I’ve found myself waking up confused about where I am- especially since my California experience involved a few friends whom I know as New Yorkers, not Californians, and I’ve been to too many places in the last 2.5 months for the state of health I’m in.

I don’t have a return flight yet.

This feels a bit like I’m unnaturally teleporting around the universe, I’ve seen too many regions and weathers in less than one week, and it’s dizzying and disorienting. I mentioned to an online friend in the solar industry that all the travel I’m doing has used up any fossil carbon that my biodiesel students saved through whatever I taught them. He’s in the nonprofit world promoting solar energy, and responded that they call that kind of travel for the cause “offsetting the offset.”

I started off today in Oakland by sleeping in a friend’s dark windowless cave-room till 4:30 pm, which means that by Eastern Standard Time I managed to stay down till 7:30 at night.

The last visit to Oakland was absolutely insane, I was trying to get everything done by the 16th, had the Lyme treatment Herxheimer Reaction from hell, failed miserably to get the move done, and this time around I’m going to take it a bit slower and actually have a social life again. Somewhere in all the remaining moving, buying of my theoretical disposable truck (I hope), selling of things, car repairing and rebuilding, and paid work, I have a bunch of work to do with the last of the gas chromatograph setup. Friends are coming out of the woodwork in response to my Twitter and other posts and my ‘dance card’ is filling up pretty quickly too, I should have slightly better balance to my life next week than I’d had for a few months.

I got a few really nice emails/phone calls/offers of showers/etc after my last post. It really wasn’t so bad- mostly frustrating with an undertone of funny to find that I couldn’t break in to the shop shower room.

Thanks folks!

I’m moving out of my California shop. I hung on to it, first because I was sharing it with Tom, who still lives there, and later because I was in Oakland for most of the spring and thought I might be coming back for school in the fall, and still later, because I was too sick to leave my room in NC and couldn’t deal with travel there.

It’s been a few days of forklifting things off the racks and palletizing them for transport (at some point). It’s a welding shop so everything is covered in years’ worth of fossilized grinding dust. For the last 2 days I just locked myself in and slept on the couch- I’m excruciatingly sick and have few functional hours in the day, so the loading is taking forever.

The clean ‘residents’ bathroom (as opposed to the minimalist day users’ bathroom) at the shop, which I helped build, is the only one with a shower, and it’s locked and inaccessible to non-resident users. Last night I was filthier than you can imagine, coated in carcinogenic who knows what, and in pain, and cold, and miserable, and I tried to break in to the locked shower room to no avail. I shivered myself to sleep on the couch.

Babesiosis is a malaria-like illness (though it seems to reside mostly in bone marrow rather than red blood cells themselves as far as I know???). One of it’s hallmark traits is chills and fevers, just like malaria. I haven’t had night sweats/fevers in quite a few weeks, since I’ve been treating it with anti-malarial drugs, butbefore that, there was a pretty regular 4:30 am microbial party in my bone marrow, or whatever it is that the evil bastidges do to cause drenching fevers.

This week of course I was beating myself up way beyond my capacity, and some of my other symptoms that I hadn’t seen in months have been coming back. So, at the ‘regularly scheduled’ fever hour of 5 am, I got a drenching malaria-like sweat episode, soaking my clothes and blankets all the way through- all while still covered in my thick layer of black, nasty grinding dust. This disease misery stuff is starting to push me over the edge.

Once upon a time, in a biodiesel group that could be just any biodiesel group and is not me…

-Someone had a methoxide mixer

-Someone’s methoxide mixer used a pump to mix methanol and lye

-Someone’s methoxide mixer was a cone-bottom tank that mixed from bottom to top, which I think leads to the following scenario quite often:

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly, like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do- even though people tend to try to insert ‘baskets’ into the cone-bottom plastic tanks thinking that they’ll somehow stay put and keep the KOH from clumping up

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly, like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do- even though people tend to try to insert ‘baskets’ into the cone-bottom plastic tanks thinking that they’ll somehow stay put and keep the KOH from clumping up. This theory doesn’t tend to work because with plastic cone-bottom tanks most connections other than the top lid and bottom plumbing just aren’t very secure and very few things can be modified about their configuration

-Said someone Who Shall Not Be Named had a very large, solid clog in what I assume is the bottom of their methoxide mixer based on a cone-bottom tank et al

- Someone Who Shall Not Be Named has this happen relatively regularly. I once saw a certain member of the Someone Who Shall Not Be Named group, sitting amongst clogged methoxide mixer plumbing parts with his arm up the mixer up to his elbow. I thought of large-animal veterinary procedures involving the nasty end of the animal. They make gloves for that, you know.

-This year’s iteration of ‘how to unclog the methoxide mixer crystalline rock of poison’ scenario apparently included sulfuric acid. That Someone had around from years past, in case they ever got around to doing acid-base biodiesel.

-Someone Who Shall Not Be Named apparently used GALLONS of sulfuric acid, of the 95% concentration, to unclog their KOH-carbonated KOH rock.

Terrifying. I’m so glad no one lost an eye, or a face.

Sulfuric acid is one of the nastiest, scariest dangerous chemicals we work with. It’s essential in acid-catalyzed esterification- other acids and other catalysts can be used, with drawbacks- so H2SO4 it is. I’m madly in love with acid-catalyzed esterification. I actually got jealous of Greg one day a few months ago when he started messing around with it. Tom used to say at one point that in our relationship, biodiesel was ‘the other woman’ that he took a second seat to- and I did in fact leave that relationship due partially to the call of ‘the other woman’. With Greg, it was more of a feeling like he’d touched my Other Woman. It was pretty funny.

Anyway, I do worry, greatly, about all the people who are messing around with sulfuric acid because of my proselytizing.

I do think that the worst problem we’ll experience in homebrew ing isn’t someone burning themselves, but that someone will get KOH in their eyes and will be blinded. That’s one of the things I lay in bed worrying aobut.

Sulfuric acid is probably the second worst hazard- second only because fewer people are using it. I’m worried that we teach people some really rudimentary chemistry, and some of them are going to take the relatively simple and relatively safe procedures of transesterification and apply them to things involving sulfuric acid, HCl, or other concentrated acids. Acid-base reactions can cause quite a bit of heat, splashing, fumes, etc- and I don’t think people are quite prepared for it.

-

I’m in California for a few more days, feeling like I’m juggling a bunch of money and potential purchases.

This is known as the ‘picking up where I left off when my health fell apart’ maneuver. Yuck. I was supposed to be in a much more interesting place by now.

I never “completed” my complicated move to the East Coast- partially because I wasn’t sure where I was going to ultimately end up, and partially because I own a ton of shop stuff and it’s a huge load to haul, so this is what I’m here, working on, as part of a multi-trip complicatedness.

At this point I’m moving out of my shop finally. I’m hoping to not move into a storage container, but into a trailer (to put into cheap storage) instead. I basically don’t have the time or quite enough money to do a cross country drive with the trailer this month- have a class coming up the weekend after next- so I"m trying to get an enclosed trailer, put my crap in there, come back in a couple of months when it’s warmer, with enough cash to buy a ‘disposable’ truck, do the one-way drive East, and sell the disposable truck. Yes, it makes more sense than getting a moving van, especially because I am probably moving to Asheville in a couple of months from Raleigh, and it makes no sense to unload everything twice. Lots of ‘probablies’ in chronic illness, by the way. Few certainties.

Currently I’m juggling:

-getting the moving trailer. I need one anyway- the future of the ‘class teaching trailer’ is a weird hybrid enclosed-flatbed system I’ve wanted for several years. I found the grumpiest seller EVER on Craigslist, who’s got a really good price on one, but was such an ass that I wanted to ask him if he actually wanted the money or what. I’ll be looking at this tomorrow.

-getting half a tote of fuel processed into biodiesel for this future drive crosscountry in warmer weather. Methanol is insanely pricey right now- GRRR- but getting a head start on this would mean that I’d get a much easier time with soap removal- ie , long settling time before I actually use the stuff= no washing or any other work.

In other news, Andrew Morris helped make an arrangement whereby I can get use of a large processor of some friends of his, and do it all in one batch. In other other news, he spent a day or two making his own ‘large batch’, which apparently included recovering from the fact that they’d left a lot of water in the processor (???) and he didn’t check before pumping his nice perfect oil into it. Add that to the safety checklist- if using someone else’s processor, assume nothing, check everything.

-getting the gas chromatograph last bits and pieces and chemicals ordered. Long story, I’m very excited.

-looking at trucks and buses. I really want to get a shortbus to use as a mobile shop or a lab, and this is one option for the ‘disposable truck’ scenario. I don’t quite have enough cash to do this AND the trailer, though, and it makes more sense to wait on the truck on this trip, and get “the perfect vehicle” later, with more money, I hope. I just missed the perfect setup- airport shuttle with a lift in the rear. It’ll come. Anyone have a bus in California that they need taken off their hands?

-juggling social life with a pile of people I havne’t seen in months. It’s sooo nice.

-working on the VW. Lots of things fell apart in my absence, and it’ll be nice to have it back to ‘good condition’ finally. I still can’t decide if it’s worth selling , as it’s so insanely convenient to have a car while I’m here, and I’m planning on being here a lot more if I stay healthier. I’ve been borrowing a friend’s friend’s professional mechanic shop, which is such a nice scenario. I (heart) hydraulic lifts.

Dumb Maneuver #200: filling the VW with smelly petrodiesel RIGHT before working on the fuel system…

Totally improbably, I’m getting really good response to my Fayetteville TN class and it might even fill up (unless this is the wave of ‘early and dedicated’ people and it’ll die down later?).

Most people with a biodiesel homebrew business are having a really hard time right now due to low gas prices and economic downturn issues. Of course, I had to postpone the Mississippi class due to the exact opposite situation- few people signing up- but most of the others are getting good response.

Thank you, people.