What is bio diesel?

Question

hi, i am doing a project for school can any one tell me what is biodiesel and waht it is used for in 50 or more words.

thank you

Answer 1

Bio diesel is a fuel made from things such as vegetable and plant oils, as well as leftover cooking fat/oil/grease.

Answer 2

Biodiesel is a fuel made from fats, either vegetable oil or animal fat (tallow, lard).  There are two main processes used.  

The most common at present is transesterification with methanol.  All fats are esters between a fatty acid and glycerin.  Transesterifcation replaces the glycerin with three methanol molecules to create three fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) molecules.  The biodiesel created by this process can mixed with petroleum derived diesel fuels and burned in many diesel engines.  The primary advantages of biodiesel are:

1) It has natural lubricating properties and thus eliminates the need for synthetic lubricating additives in ultra low sulfur diesel fuels

2) It is essentially sulfur free and has a very high cetane number (a measure of diesel fuel quality).  Thus it burns very clean reducing the production of soot.

The primary disadvantages of FAME based biodiesel are:

1) FAME is a solvent and will attack many of the plastics used in conventional diesel engine fuel systems.  Thus, most diesel engines can only handle fuels with 10% or less FAME in the mix.

2) It is more expensive to produce than conventional diesel oil, largely due to the fact that the feed stocks (fats) cost more than petroleum (this is true even of waste fats when you add in the costs of collection transportation and pre-processing).

The other process for producing biodiesel is through a conventional petroleum refining process known as hydroprocessing.  In this process, the fat is mixed with conventional diesel oil and reacted with hydrogen in a catalytic reactor.  This breaks the fatty ester and removes the oxygen in the fat molecules.  The product are hydrocarbons that are chemically the same as those found in conventional diesel oil.  

Biodiesel produced by this method is sulfur free and has a high cetane number but it lacks the lubricating properties of FAME.  It also lacks the solvent properties and can be burned in any diesel engine at any precentage.  It is still more expensive than petroleum based diesel.

Incidentely, you can also make gasoline from fats by feeding them to a different refinery process.  The bio-gasoline produced in this method is sulfur free and has a high octane number, but it is more expensive than gasoline made from petroleum.

Answer 3

The term "biodiesel" is often used to refer to both pure non-petroleum diesel fuel based on vegetable oils as well as petroleum-based diesel fuel to which a biological component is added.  To some purists, the term biodiesel would never be used to refer to pure vegetable oil used to power a diesel engine -- to them, the term refers to the combination of diesel fuel and vegetable oil.

Many people don't know that many diesel engines can run on many pure vegetable oils like soybean oil, canola oil and other similar oils.  See this link. http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_sv...  

In many parts of the US, vegetable oil is added to diesel fuel (the most common mixtures seem to be 10% vegetable oil and 90% diesel).  Due to issues like low lubricity (the lubricating effect that fuel has in an engine) and the fact that vegetable oils tend to congeal into a non-flowing mass which cannot easily be fed through a fuel line with out first being heated up, this seems to be the more common mixture.  Also, new vegetable oils at the moment cost more per gallon that diesel fuel, so petroleum-based diesel can actually be cheaper.

Answer 4

Bio diesel is diesel made from vegtable oil. Usually recycled. When you make french fries or anything like that you can only use the oil so long before it starts to get poluted by all the stuff you fry in it. It also starts to change the flavor of what you  cook. Because of this they change the oil from time to time and what the used oil can be filtered and chemically treated to seperate the oil into vegtable glycerin and diesel. It is not really cost effective to do this with fresh vegtable oil since it is more expensive than gasoline but when you are using the wase product of someone elses buisness then your only costs are the mixing equipment and the chemical additives that alow you to seperate the oil. This looks like a good one.   http://www.green-trust.org/making_biodie...

Answer 5

Biodiesel is a slight modification to vegetable oil.

Diesel engines can run on vegetable oil, but they have a problem with the viscosity (thickness) of the oil when it's below 120 degrees F or so.  

One solution is to modify the vegetable oil chemically so it is thinner.  That's biodiesel, and it can be used in any diesel engine.   It can also be blended with regular diesel to provide lubrication in the fuel.  Even in small percentages, biodiesel is excellent for lubricating engine internal parts.

Answer 6

his website can answer all your questions

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_ma...