Fat to Fuel : The North-Grand Veggie Oil Vehicle

Friday, March 14, 2008

The Skinny on our Neighborhood Restaurants' Fat

We were originally planning to use the waste vegetable oil from our school cafeteria's deep fryers. In a move to improve the nutritional value of our school lunches, though, CPS stopped using deep fryers and started using baked fries. Fortunately for our project, there is no shortage of used veggie oil in our neighborhood. We have begun collecting oil from our school culinary arts department (Thanks Mr. Chatman) as well as some local restaurants. You can view a Google Map of our neighborhood restaurant partners. We are especially grateful to El Taconazo, Lees Garden and Carnicerias Jimenez for their help and support.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

today - By Jr. Santa

today we went to pick up some waste veggie oil so we can filter it and put it into a car

Sunday, March 9, 2008

The car we will be converting

This is the 1980 Mercedes Benz 300TD Wagon we have purchased and will be converting to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO).

It runs well, but needs a little work on the suspension and has a bit of rust on the underside.

What? Energy in a peanut?

By burning a peanut we release its chemical energy. We can measure this by noting how much the burning peanut can increase the temperature of 50ml of water. The photo above shows shows the calorimetry set-up we used to measure the energy in a peanut.

The experiment wasn't perfect though, because we didn't have a way to measure the mass of the smoke released and we lost some heat to the air and the calorimeter itself.

In order to figure out how much energy there is per mass we used electronic balances to get the mass of the peanuts before and after burning.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Hydrocarbons

How can we run a car on vegetable oil? Since the hydrocarbon chains for diesel fuel and for vegetable oil are simmilar a diesel engine should run on clean veggie oil.

We drew 2-d models of molecules and built 3-d models of hydrocarbons and compared them. Once we built the models and drew the diagrams it was easy to see how veggie oil could run a diesel car.

The Fat to Fuel Veggie Vehicle

We have converted a 1980 Mercedes Benz 300 TurboDiesel car to run on waste vegetable oil. This green energy biofuel project would not have been possible without help from the following people and organizations. BP's A+ for Energy grant is funding our project. Pete Probst from Chicago Biofuels is a car conversion expert and he helped us each step of the way. Chad Bliss from the Cob Connection helped us with the community building and urban agriculture aspects of our project. After School Matters provided funding to enhance the program and provide stipends to many of the involved students. This work would not have been possible without strong support from our principal, Dr. Ayala the help of the students, faculty, engineering and custodial staff and administration of North-Grand HS. We especially want to thank Mr. Jose DeLaGarza one of our building engineers who took a special interest in our project and helped us improve the Oil Filtration system in so many ways. Thank you.

Fat to Fuel The North-Grand Veggie Vehicle

North-Grand HS teacher Phillip Cantor received a grant from the BP corporation to work with North-Grand students to modify a diesel vehicle to run on recycled vegetable oil from local restaurants. We have purchased a 1980 Mercedes Benz 300 TD station wagon and have modified it to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO.) We have also built a waste oil filtration unit to make the oil usable in the car's diesel engine. We are learning about energy, alternative energy sources, urban agriculture and other related topics as well. If you would like to contact us please e-mail Mr. Phil Cantor at mr.cantor@gmail.com .