Week 2

Week 2 began with doing more research on the pretreatment of feedstock. It appears that using food grease from food trucks has not been thought of yet and if it has, information about it is not readily available. Evidently, one of the first things that will need to be removed from the grease is materials such as crumbs. For this, we will need a filtering process. The group designed a preliminary system and is shown in the figure below. It is a model of a smaller system designed to filter one liter at a time.  The main container will be an upside-down 2-liter soda bottle with the bottom cut off. The bottom of the bottle (now the top) filters bigger things with mesh, then filters smaller things with rocks and finally filters the smaller particles with a paint filter paper. Another idea for filtering the grease is to use a gravy separator that separates the grease based on the varying densities inside. It became apparent after drawing this down on paper that some of the less dense grease will be mixed with the dense grease because of the spout. To solve this, the group could add a door at the bottom of the spout so the grease is able to separate before coming out of the spout.

The design proposal was also created during week 2 and the group met with the lab instructor. During this meeting, we discussed our filtration process and how this is a small scale model that could be made full size. Furthermore, we discussed ideas for the filtering process, such as using other filter paper and whether rocks would dirty the grease. Instead of rocks, glass balls such as marbles may be a better idea. Furthermore, we plan to process the feedstock into biofuel and test the quality of the biofuel. As a control, we will also process feedstock that was not filtered and compare the differences.