Weekly Progress Report: Week 3

This week, the group gathered supplies and set up their experiment.

Louis got some waste oil from a nearby Chik-Fil-A.

                                                    Figure 1- Waste oil in funnel

Blake and Esmail bought epoxy, alligator clips, pencil lead, aluminum foil, and copper wire. Esmail went to the machine shop and made a piece of wood to hold the electrodes in place. In lab, Esmail and Blake glued the pencil lead together into bunches to be used as electrodes. Meanwhile, Louis, Jiaqi, and Dong processed the crude feedstock oil. They filtered the particulate matter from the oil. At first, they tried to use a centrifuge to separate out the solids. However, the oil was too viscous for the centrifuge to have any effect.

  Then, they used a Buchner funnel to remove the solids. At this point, the feedstock oil was a rich brown color (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Processed oil feedstock

Louis, Jiaqi and Dong titrated a sample of the feedstock to determine the free fatty acid content (Video 1). More details on this procedure can be found in the page "Experimental Process - Step 1."

Video 1 - Titration of processed feedstock

This week, the group plans to obtain a DC power supply for the experiment. Blake will go to the machine shop to modify the mount for the electrodes.  In addition, a procedure for the electrolysis experiment will be written. In lab, the group will make its first batch of crude biodiesel.