Information & Updates

April 24, 2009—NCSU eGames

NCSU had its first ever Entrepreneurship Games, an Olympic-style competition for entrepreneurship. Our team won 4 awards and a total of $5250! We took home gold for best graphic design and business plan, silver for best video, and bronze for best investor presentation. We also won the audience award for the video. We also managed to get some good points of contact for potential investors and grant money, along with information for patent lawyers to continue with the project post-graduation. It was a very exciting day for our team and we are very pleased and excited for the days to come!

April 22, 2009—First run and NCSU Design Day

We ran our reactor for the first time in the wee hours of the morning. We ran a batch of peanut oil through it and made a very successful batch of biodiesel! It still needs to be water washed but looks very high quality already. We are very pleased with our results! Thanks also should be given to Dr. Alex Hobbs who stayed with us until 2:30am to see the start and oversee the operation. Thank you!


First run video!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQAsbHPnokA

We also presented our prototype and biodiesel at the NC State ECE Design Day. We had our reactor on site and had samples of what we have produced so far, and a video of our first run. We got a lot of interest and very positive feedback. It was a very good day for our team leaders.

April 18th, 2009—Biodiesel from brown grease

After running our acid pretreatment phase twice and the traditional process on our brown grease sample, we successfully made a 500mL batch of brown grease biodiesel! Our prototype reactor is almost finished and the automation work is coming along well. We will be producing biodiesel through the reactor and using automation within a few days.

 

April 14th, 2009—We made biodiesel!

We made our first batch of biodiesel from peanut oil in a mason jar.  We made about a 500mL batch and tested it using a test kit from Piedmont Biofuels and it tested as being good, high quality fuel!  We are currently working on producing a 500mL sample of biodiesel from our brown grease.


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April 13th, 2009—Prototype reactor

We have a 30 gallon stainless steel reactor vessel, which was donated to us by the NCSU Solar Center and are finishing gathering parts for the build. We are very close to our prototype reactor being build, complete, and making biodiesel on command!


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April 9th, 2009—Mock-up reactor

The NCSU Solar Center had a small-scale biodiesel reactor that we were graciously allowed to borrow to use as a mock-up reactor. We have attached our pumps and automation equipment to it and planned how we will build our stainless steel prototype reactor. We are gathering parts and plan to start building next week

March 9, 2009—Chem testing

Our chemistry team has been testing both our trap grease and brown grease samples for free fatty acids and trying to develop a way to separate oil from them.  The free fatty acid content of our trap grease was about 52%, which is very high and very good for us! Our brown grease had a FFA content of about 8%, which isn’t as high as we would like, but still too high to use the traditional biodiesel production process on. It is proving very difficult to separate oil from trap grease, while oil naturally separates out of the brown grease, so for our prototype reactor, we will be focusing on using our brown grease from Triangle Biofuels.

February 23, 2009 - Grant Update

We have heard back from both the NC Green Business Fund and the NC IDEA grant program and unfortunantely have not passed the pre-proposal stage. We have taken the feedback from these grants and are working towards rewriting these for future grant opportunities.

February 19, 2009 – Triangle Biofuels Trip

We’ve got brown grease! Today we took a thrilling road trip to Wilson, NC to visit Barry at Triangle Biofuels. He was more than happy to give us three buckets of brown grease, which the Triangle Biofuels facility isn’t able to use because of its high Free Fatty Acid (FFA) content. We also got to look around the plant and ask questions about filtration systems, mixing pumps, and heating methods. In a few weeks, after our large-scale reactor is up and running, we’ll be making a trip back to pick up ~30 more gallons of grease.

Brown grease sample
 Sample brown grease collected at Triangle Biofuels

February 2, 2009 - Trap Grease Samples!

Our first real trap grease samples were acquired today from Earthworx, LLC in Durham. The grease had already been water seperated which helps us reduce seperation issues. Unfortuantely the trap grease we recovered was mostly solid waste and only about 10% useable oil. We are currently still evaluating seperation and processing methods using this grease and testing its FFA content.

Andrew Canton Scooping Trap Grease
Andrew Canton retrieves a sample from the dewatering container
A successful sample!
Happy Campers

January 30, 2009 - NC IDEA Grant Application

NC Future Fuels has applied for $50,000 in grant funding towards Intellectual Property filings.

January 9, 2009 - NC Green Business Fund Application

NC Future Fuels has applied for $100,000 in grant funding towards a 1 million gallon processing plant in North Carolina.

January 5, 2009 – New Lab for Chemistry work

NC Future Fuels has moved the base of chemical operations from the NC Poultry Waste Management Center to the much less smelly Flex Labs building across from NC State’s Centennial Campus. We anticipate a quickening in pace of progress as we get closer and closer to optimizing our chemical conversion from high FFA grease to biodiesel.

October 1, 2009

NC Future Fuels travels to Triangle Biofuels to get sample grease! We got some nice high Free Fatty Acid (FFA) content grease.

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Andrew prepares to get down and dirty at TBI getting brown grease samples.
Bill scoops a sample of waste water and soap from TBI's evaporation pool.
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Barry from TBI helps pump out some lovely, stinky, foul brown grease. It looks as good as it smells!