PC Engineering in Newberg, OR is making modifications to the 1 ton plant that will give us the ability to gather new data needed to properly modify the plant so it can produce clean biooil by resolving much of the char in the smoke issue.

We will also be picking up a used generator that can run the plant when away from electric power sources. We managed to find a 20 KW diesel generator that can run on regular diesel, biodiesel and waste motor oil if filtered to 5 microns. This is a very tough engine and we are hoping that we will eventually be able to run it on biooil produced by the plant. We will not test it with biooil until we get some external tests on the biooil and see if it meets our needs. In the mean time we hope to be able to run it with waste motor oil.

The modifications to the plant that will be tested initially will be the addition of a pressure gauge and a gas flow speed  sensor that will allow us to calibrate the fan speed to get the proper speeds through the cyclone. These pieces of information are needed to properly engineer the elements of the gas flow and cooling system properly to remove the char particles. Up till now we have had only 8 thermocouples that gave us temperatures at different points in the process. These are not enough information to do the engineering needed to build a proper particulate removal system.

So the next step may solve some of the problems quickly in terms of the particulate problem but if nothing else it will give us the data needed to make the proper modifications to eventually solve the char in the gas problem.