Re-Building for the new 'waterless' wash

Well, I have sourced another water heater and have begun the process of turning it into a still. Hopefully, if all goes well, the still will be used to de-meth the biodiesel into its finished product without the use of a water wash. De-meth'ing the biodiesel will perform the same function as a water wash... removing the impurities (soaps, methanol, etc...). The basic reason this works is the soaps are disolved in the methanol; removing the methanol leaves nowhere for the soaps to reside, causing the soaps to essentially fall out. Running this through a filter is all that should be left to do.

If possible, I will use this same still to recover the extra methanol from the glycerin byproduct for re-use.
More on this later if it all works as designed.

The current plan is to have the still finished by the end of this weekend (4/01/07)...we'll see how it goes.

Another discovery

Research is a wonderful thing. In researching the biodiesel making process (again), I have come across a new procedure where a 'water wash' is no longer needed.

Water washing is a process used to take out the excess methanol, soaps, and other impurities in the raw biodiesel. There are problems with using a water wash; they include the following:

• possibility of causing an emulsion
• the necessity of having to now dry the biodiesel
• waste water disposal
  
• time (dealing with adding/removing the water multiple times)
• and there are probably others...

This new process (called the GL's 1 Day Process) eliminates the need to use water in the wash process. To make a very long discussion about this process shorter, it goes by the principal that soaps can not stay in suspension in biodiesel without excess methanol. Thus, removing the excess methanol (without using water to do so) will cause the soaps to quite literally fall out to the bottom of the 'wash tank'. There have been a few ways discussed on the 'best' way to do this, but basically, evaporation or distillation of the methanol seems to work the easiest.

I have chosen to distill the raw (un-washed) biodiesel in another water heater. The plan is to set up the water heater as a still to collect the methanol if at all possible for re-use (and at worst case keep it out of the air in my work area.

We'll see how this goes... back to the drawing board on the processor.