Campus frying oil powers campus equipment
Senior Drew VanDeGriff converts used cooking oil to clean burning biofuel.
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A group of manufacturing and industrial technology students at Tennessee Tech is turning one department’s trash into another’s treasure.
Students are recycling the campus’ canola oil used for frying and converting it to bio-diesel fuel that can be used to run vehicles and machinery for the School of Agriculture and other university units. At the same time, they are researching ways to make the process even cleaner.
The project exemplifies the university’s focus on sustainability efforts by substituting a reusable dry-wash polymer for a process that traditionally uses a significant amount of water, said Ahmed ElSawy, chairperson of manufacturing engineering technology.
“Water is traditionally used to cleanse impurities from cooking oil that is to be converted to bio-diesel fuel, but finding a way to dispose of that wash water can be a challenge,” ElSawy said. “Our experimental process employs a reusable drywash polymer to attract foreign molecules in the cooking oil.”
The polymer, which is about the consistency of sand or fine sawdust, can be cleaned and reused, and the final result of the process is a bio-diesel fuel clean and pure enough to use in vehicle and machinery engines.
About 100 gallons of used cooking oil is being collected each week from the university’s food services department, and senior Drew VanDeGriff estimates that three pounds of the dry polymer could be used and reused to produce several hundred gallons of fuel.
“We’re in the experimental phase right now, working with only two five-gallon batches at a time, but the more bio-diesel you make, the more you save. The more cost-effective it becomes,” VanDeGriff said.
With the project producing between 150-200 gallons of fuel a month, though, the cost savings is already significant.
“The cost of diesel at the pump right now is about $2 per gallon, and it has been more than $4 per gallon,” VanDeGriff said. “Making 40 to 50 gallons of bio-diesel the way we’re doing it reduces the cost to about 80 cents a gallon.”
(Summer 2009)
