Extraordinary! They destroy thousands of hectares of virgin rainforests in Indonesia to produce palm oil for 'green' fuels, and it doesn't even work properly.
The 'they' who destroyed the forests - are you suggesting they are green?
Statins for trains?
It's a very old story dating back to 2011 when B7 was introduced. Have you caught up with events.
Very few motorists have issues with biodiesel, and any other user of biodiesel and storage should know the issues by now.
Anyone of repute will be very aware of diesel bug and use biocides accordingly. I use biocides to stop diesel bug, and I use agglomerators and filters in my fuel systems to stop any issues.
What is more of note are these issues which seem to have an unknown origin:
Of course only an art student would say it's 'engines' that are being 'clogged' rather than fuel systems, but hey
Well, there's a thing called organic chemistry.
You can make anything from anything else. It just costs money to do it.
At a refinery, they have crackers for changing chain length. You can change the composition of a fuel. You can blend it. Or re-blend it. Petrol for example, has around 200 compounds in it, and if you have a ramping GC, you can see the peaks from all of these. It's called a "fingerprint" for a reason. We did this, in a lab in uni (petrol analysis).
If this "green" material is entering the product stream without refinement, what would we expect except symptoms like this. If you take deep fat fryer oil and pour it straight into your diesel, what would you expect the results to be ? Why, the exhaust would smell of crisps. "And that ain't right."
What does analysis of palm oil show ? Is it 100% pure analytical grade chemical ? I would guess, "no", as it's probably run through something like a cold press, and organic residue might enter the product as well. And of course, being a biological source, it has organisms in it as well. Tropical organisms. Tropical organisms tuned for eating palm oil.
The chemical industry, does make significant use of natural source items. They're used as base stock for certain reactions. This can cut the number of reaction steps in half. it's not like this sort of work does not happen all the time. The deal is though, the people doing the work, are looking for analytical grade output product (for things like drugs). Whereas fuel receives the most cheap and ignorant processing possible.
If the palm oil was mixed into the crude oil tank at the refinery, who knows how much more refined the product would be. And the stack at the refinery would "smell of palm oil", because the residue would be burned as thermal fuel. But refining also costs money-per-liter.
Paul
SWR are using end of life restaurant oil so no rainforests were destroyed for this trial, only a few haddock and chips.
SWT had to drain out and clean tanks holding 35,000+ litres of buggy biodiesel, plus many trains resulting in an emergency timetable change.
You could tell what is going on, with a GC/MS.
We had one of those at work (government lab).
And it was set up specifically for fingerprinting fuel residue (pollution spill). The instrument belonged to a PhD, and the guy wouldn't even show us what a printout looked like from it.
Since the sticky stuff "smells of turps", it would be an organic and show in the GC/MS. The reported smell is a very nice observation, in terms of pointing a lab where to start work. The hard part, will be figuring out what thing in the diesel additive, is interacting with the diesel mix. The diesel additive could have an inorganic, which is catalyzing a side reaction. And you'd need a tiny bit of water, to make the reaction "go".
Paul
Also, "diesel bug" attacks *all* diesel, not just biodiesel. The "diesel bugs" need water, and biodiesel is slightly more hygroscopic than regular diesel. There is always trace water in diesel...
It a well-known problem. Particularly nasty in ships, where a storm will shake up the biofilm in the tank and overload the filters when the engines are needed most.
More here:
Thomas Prufer
No problem with Mercedes short wheelbase G-Wagon, with indirect injection engine.
If blaming green zealots for having ultimate responsibility for destroying huge areas of virgin rainforest in Indonesia in their misplaced efforts to reduce carbon emissions, is bias, then I plead guilty!
I don't think 'green' had any direct impact on thr reasoning - mainly greed, land grabbing, and corruption I'd have thought.
It's the trains. If a leaves on the line can stop them, anything can.
I think I'll steer clear of any fuel additive! Apart from the biocide I mentioned of course.
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