How to liquidate floating plastic debris on your Boat into diesel fuel
These days Ocean Clean Up has fished more than 100,000kg of plastic out of the sea. It’s roughly 1/1000th of the large Pacific Garbage Patch. Garbage is often simply thrown back into the sea as by-catch, that doesn’t have to be the case! We could convert it to diesel directly on the boat or remotely on islands. Or you upcycle the debris into roofing tiles like described here.
The process is really simple, it is similar to making alcohol. If you heat plastic waste in an oxygen-free environment, it will melt but not burn. After it melts it starts to boil and vaporize, you just have to pass these vapors through a cooling tube and on cooling the vapors condense into a liquid and some of the vapors with shorter hydrocarbon lengths are left as a gas. The exit of the cooling tube then goes through a bubbler containing water to catch the last liquid forms of fuel, leaving only gas which is then burned. If cooling of the cooling tube is sufficient, there will be no fuel in the bubbler, but if not, the water will capture any remaining fuel floating above the water.
via Seadesigners.com This device works with photovoltaic electricity (3 phases), has six nichrome coils as heating elements and consumes a total of 6 kW (1 kW per coil). The coils are turned on and off by three solid state relays, one for each phase, the relays are controlled by a digital thermostat with a temperature sensor slightly below the lid so vapor temperature can be monitored. You need to slowly heat the plastic to around 350 degrees and just wait for it to do the magic. Our device has a capacity of 50 liters and can hold around 30 kg of shredded plastic. The process takes about 4 hours, but can be significantly reduced with a little tweaking of the design. As said, this results in a liquid fuel that can be used as a multifuel, that is, it can be used in diesel engines and also in gasoline engines, but we still have to test if it works with gasoline. It works perfectly for diesel engines, that has already been tested. There is a difference in what plastic you use. If you use polyethylene (plastic cans, plastic sheeting and all sorts of flexible shatterproof plastic) you end up with liquid fuel that solidifies to paraffin when it cools, which it’s still good for diesel engines as long as you use a heated fuel tank, as that only needs to be heated to around 30 degrees Celsius to be liquid and transparent. If you don’t want that you can run the paraffin through the device again and you’re going to cut these hydrocarbons even smaller and half the paraffin becomes liquid fuel and the other half stays a paraffin but much more dense and melts out at higher temperatures, that’s the stuff that you can make candles and it doesn’t smell at all when it’s burning, maybe a bit like candles. But if you use polypropylene (computer monitor cases, printer cases, other plastics that break easily) you only get liquid fuel, no paraffin at all. All you need is to filter the solids out of the fuel and you’re good to go and pour it into your gas tank. We did the analysis and it’s almost the perfect diesel fraction. It does not contain acids or bases like fuel from tires. The unit in the pictures can convert around 60kg of plastic into 60 liters of fuel in a day. Other methods of heating the reactor can be used, electricity is simply easier to handle and control. Some Japanese companies make such devices, but their prices for this size unit are more than $100,000, our homemade device cost us a maximum of $900. We use alumina bricks to insulate heat, they are light as foam and easily cut into any shape, however any type of insulator can be used. The bricks make the highest costs with this device. It can also be used to heat the reactor using liquid fuel burners or heliostats whereby the device can be made self-sufficient using about 10–15% of the produced fuel together with the produced gas. A small farm can use a device of this size and make fuel by itself by turning plastic waste into fuel, farms have a lot of plastic waste and it’s a big problem, at least in my country. Our next goal is to enable the same with biomass, any farm could then take old leaves, wet grass, sawdust and all kinds of biomass and gasify them into tar-like substances that can then be passed through the pyrolyzer and converted. A small farm can use a device of this size and make fuel by itself by turning plastic waste into fuel, farms have a lot of plastic waste and it’s a big problem, at least in my country. Our next goal is to enable the same with biomass, any farm could then take old leaves, wet grass, sawdust and all kinds of biomass and gasify them into tar-like substances that can then be passed through the pyrolyzer and converted. A small farm can use a device of this size and make fuel by itself by turning plastic waste into fuel, farms have a lot of plastic waste and it’s a big problem, at least in my country. Our next goal is to enable the same with biomass, any farm could then take old leaves, wet grass, sawdust and all kinds of biomass and gasify them into tar-like substances that can then be passed through the pyrolyzer and converted.
