Driving technology:
Shared skills key to biodiesel reactor
 couple of years ago, Madison Area Technical College
Diesel Technology Program Instructor Paul Morschauser
asked MATC chemistry instructor Ken Walz what
he knew about biodiesel. “At the time, the answer was zero,”
says Walz, who studied electrochemistry for the 2006 PhD in engineering
he earned from UW-Madison.
Morschauser’s question arose as a result of
a National Science Foundation grant that established MATC as the lead
institution of the Consortium for Education in Renewable Energy Technologies.
Under Walz’s colleague Joy McMillan,
the grant had four objectives: develop a curriculum for renewable energy
instruction, provide opportunities for faculty professional development
in renewable energy, develop a demonstration site for renewable energy
technology, and provide training for current renewable energy employees.
Walz and Morschauser set out to provide a platform
for the latter two goals. Walz turned to his former PhD advisor, Professor
Marc Anderson, who was seeking design projects for freshmen enrolled
in his section of InterEgr 160, Introduction to Engineering. “I
said, ‘We’ve been talking at the technical college that
it would be nice to have a small-scale reactor that we could use for
training students about biodiesel,’” says Walz.
And the pieces and personnel fell into place—including
Ramsey Kropp, a former student of Walz’s
who recently had transferred to UW-Madison from MATC and was working
in Anderson’s laboratory. “We had people on both campuses
who could make things happen; we had at least one student who already
was pretty interested in the technology,” says Walz. “The
only problem was that we didn’t know a whole lot about biodiesel
yet—and certainly didn’t know about building biodiesel reactors.”
Existing designs available on the Internet, says
Walz, were pretty crude. For the MATC reactor, the freshmen needed to
design a safe device that could, at one time, process 20 to 50 gallons
of fryer oil from Morschauser’s northern Wisconsin bar. The reactor
had to be small enough that a forklift operator could load it onto the
bed of a pickup truck and “presentable” enough for MATC
staff and students to exhibit it. In addition, it had to include a computer
interface so that its operators could control and monitor oil temperature
as the reaction took place.
Before they began researching a design, the UW-Madison
students took a field trip to MATC to learn about diesel technology.
“They actually spent the afternoon with our diesel tech instructors
down in their shop, learning about diesel engines and about our diesel
program here so that they knew who their customer was and what design
criteria were necessary for the reactor,” says Walz.
MATC students also helped to teach the UW-Madison
students fabrication skills like welding. “There was at least
one student who had never used an electric drill before, and she was
really proud,” says Walz.
The UW-Madison team designed and built the reactor
in just under a semester. It can process 50 gallons of oil at a time.
In the main reaction tank, screw-plug immersion heaters warm the oil
to 50 degrees Celsius, a temperature controlled by three computer-driven
sensors. A separate tank prepares the catylist: potassium hydroxide
dissolved into methyl alcohol. Ten gallons of catylist reacts with the
oil and a recirculation pump agitates the mixture throughout the reaction,
which takes about an hour.
When the reaction is finished, operators turn off
the pumps and heating elements and allow the reactor’s contents
to cool to room temperature. The result is 50 gallons of biodiesel and
10 gallons of glycerol, a high-density polar molecule that settles to
the reactor bottom, where it drains out. Finally, in a third tank, the
biodiesel goes through a washing process, a spray-misting system that
rids the fuel of any remaining catylist.
Staff and students in the MATC Diesel Technology
Program use the fuel in their fleet of nearly 50 vehicles and pieces
of heavy equipment—everything from front-end loaders and bobcats
to semi trucks and bulldozers. In addition, they test how diesel engines
fare on a diet of biodiesel through dynamometer experiments that examine
factors like torque, horsepower, engine oil content and emissions.
The reactor also has spurred additional research
collaborations: With a state grant, MATC researchers are working with
Great Lakes BioFuels, Madison, to study the oil content in different
soybean varieties. And, the researchers are working with Aspectrix,
a Middleton-based chemical instrumentation company, to add an infrared
spectroscope to the reactor so that staff who use it can measure the
infrared spectrum as the fuel is being processed. “So in addition
to just being able to control temperature, we’d actually be able
to monitor the chemical composition of the fuel as it changes from the
oil into the biodiesel,” says Walz.
Since the biodiesel reactor debuted in summer 2006,
it has entertained visitors from Germany, the Wisconsin legislature,
and a group from Lake Washington Technical College in Washington state,
among others. The reactor also has traveled around Wisconsin, making
stops at conferences that involve faculty and staff at Indianhead Technical
College, UW Barron County, Fox Valley Technical College, Northeast Technical
College, and UW Extension. It regularly shows up at tractor pulls and
is scheduled to appear at the Wisconsin State Fair this summer and Farm
Technology Days in early fall.
Walz says the biodiesel reactor project was a success
because it capitalized on skills available at MATC and at UW-Madison.
“It really builds on the complimentary strengths of the two institutions,”
he says. “Had we attempted to do this project ourselves, we lacked
a lot of the design expertise. And on the other hand, the students at
UW—being freshmen engineers—really lacked expertise in fabrication,
which is sort of our strength here at this campus. By partnering, we
were really able to play off those assets and I think ended up with
just a dynamite project.”
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