-Jim
23 December 2005
There has been a good deal of work lately on removing the methanol to reduce the soap content. It looks like that by reducing the methanol content of the biodiesel and then filtering you are able to lower the soap content. This greatly reduces the amount of Magnesol needed to wash your biodiesel. It appears that this is the trick to how Burlington Biodiesel is able to use such low levels of Magnesol. If you bubble air through the biodiesel to vent out the methanol you will need to do something to prevent it from being released into the air. Check out www.biodiesel.infopop.cc and search the threads for ways to condense/remove methanol.
You do not have to do this, but it will reduce the amount of Magnesol you need to use.
-Jim 17 July 2006
The Magnesol D60 has been renamed D-Sol and it is ready to ship. The sample boxes will continue to be R60 until the last few bags of R60 are gone.
-Jim
22 August 2006
I just finished my first batch of biodiesel using the methanol removal/filtering described above. I used the 5% prewash method and ended up with 1100ppm soap in my raw biodiesel plus it settled in 1 hour instead of overnight. Then I recirculated/spray dried to remove the small amount of water added in the 5% prewash and to remove the methanol. I ended up with 450ppm soap. I could not get it to go any lower, even after a day of running the biodiesel through a 1 micron bag filter. I added 630 or so grams of Magnesol D60 (D-Sol) to my 42 gallon batch for the dry wash. Because of the 5% prewash and the methanol removal/filtering I was able to cut my magnesol usage down to .45% by weight. In other words, one 45 pound bag of magnesol will wash 1370 gallons of biodiesel using this method. That works out to 6.5 cents per gallon for magnesol shipped to someone within a few hundred miles of Tennessee ($15 shipping). It works out to $8.4 cents per gallon to someone in parts of Washington State or California ($40 shipping).
-Jim
25 August 2006
