Provides up-to-date coverage of how to produce fuel for diesel cars and trucks inexpensively, challenging popular misconceptions about biodiesel while citing its benefits, in a guide that addresses such topics as safety, making custom batches, and avoiding common pitfalls. Original.

CONVERT TO BIODIESEL FOR A MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY RIDE

Run Your Diesel Vehicle on Biofuelshas everything you need to make the switch from expensive, environment-damaging carbon fuel to cheap (and, in many cases, free), clean fuel for your vehicle. Practical and decidedly apolitical, this unique guide focuses on technical details, parts, and instructions.

Inside, you'll find step-by-step instructions accompanied by helpful illustrations for such projects as building and properly using a homemade biodiesel reactor, which enables you to drive you car on vegetable oil purchased at a fraction of the price of gas or even on second-hand oil obtained from restaurants free of charge.Run Your Diesel Vehicle on Biofuelsalso includes a list of international parts suppliers and various manufacturers' warranty statuses regarding vehicles converted to biodiesel.

Projects include:

• Collecting waste oil
• Building a waste-oil processor
• Creating biodiesel fuel
• Converting your car to professional standards
• Constructing heat exchangers

Run Your Diesel Vehicle on Biofuels covers:
• History and functions of the diesel engine • Benefits of biofuel • Where to obtain raw ingredients • Theory of fuel conversion • Existing conversion kits o Blends, emulsions, and thinners • Processing and discarding waste oil • Laws and regulations • Green retail o Health and safety • Limitations of environmental benefits

The benefits of straight vegetable oil (SVO) as an alternate fuel for diesel engines are many. SVO is cheap, carbon-neutral, uses a waste product, and does not depend upon centralised corporate infrastructure. Authors Chris Goodwin and Forest Gregg are the founder and designer respectively, of Frybrid, the most respected vegetable oil conversion company in the US. They have many combined years of expertise in the use of straight vegetable oil as a fuel, and have sifted through the masses of contradictory, erroneous, and confusing information on the subject, extracting the very best information available.Topics covered include: Vegetable oil sources, extraction and refining; Viscosity; Chemical degradation; Fuel properties; Contaminants; System design; and, Engine modifications. This is the only book available that explains exactly what is necessary to convert a diesel vehicle and how to do it properly. It gives readers the tools to sort through the different companies and online plans to find something that works well. While technical in nature, this fully illustrated book is very accessible; each concept is introduced and described in great detail. Designed to educate new consumers, it is also an excellent resource for current conversion owners.

Environmental and political concerns are generating a growing interest in alternative engine fuels such as biodiesel. Biodiesel is a renewable energy source produced from natural oils and fats, which can be used as a substitute for petroleum diesel without the need for diesel engine modification. In addition to being biodegradable and non-toxic, biodiesel is also essentially free of sulfur and aromatics, producing lower exhaust emissions than conventional gasoline whilst providing similar properties in terms of fuel efficiency. The greatest drawback of using pure vegetable oils as fuels are their high viscosity, although this can be reduced by techniques such as dilution, micro-emulsification, pyrolysis or transesterification. Of these processes, the transesterification of vegetable oil triglycerides in supercritical methanol has been shown to be particularly promising, producing high yields of low-viscosity methyl esters without the need of a catalyst. Furthermore, these methyl esters have a considerably lower flash point than that of pure vegetable oils. Biodiesel: A Realistic Fuel Alternative for Diesel Engines describes the production and characterisation of biodiesel, along with current experimental research work in the field. The book will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in renewable energy, as well as to fuel engineers.

Biofuels for Road Transport: A Seed to Wheel Perspective provides a review of the history, the current status and perspectives for biofuels used in road transport, across the full ‘seed-to-wheel’ life cycle of these fuels. Successive chapters cover the history of biofuels; the first- and second-generation liquid fuels and biofuels for powering electric vehicles; fossil fuel replacement, land requirement, greenhouse gas balances and environmental burdens of ethanol, esters derived from fatty acids (‘biodiesel’), Fischer-Tropsch diesel and HTU diesel; competing technologies (fossil fuels, increases in energy-efficiency and photovoltaic power) and how they compare to biofuels; and the perspectives for biofuels. Cost, availability, technological development, competition with biomass for food and for soil organic carbon and environmental perspectives are also discussed. Biofuels for Road Transport: A Seed to Wheel Perspective is a valuable reference for professional engineers, researchers and postgraduate students involved in biofuels, renewable energy (including bioenergy) and the automotive industry.