Boost For Cars Powered By Vegetable Oil

Cars powered by vegetable oil have received a turbo charged boost after scientists came up with a way of purifying it into biodiesel.

Chemists at the University of Leicester have been able to remove glycerol, a syrupy sugar alcohol, from the product
by using a salty solution called an ionic liquid.
If left in biodiesel glycerol, an essential additive for animal feed and the main by product of vegetable oil based biodiesel, would damage engines but this technique simply washes it out of the fuel.

The ionic liquid developed by Professor Andrew Abbott and colleagues uses choline chloride, an essential additive for animal feed known as vitamin B4, to extract more glycerol out of the biodiesel.

Vegetable oil will react very similarly to diesel fuel under the conditions inside a diesel engine. When it is highly compressed it will heat up and ignite, causing the air in the cylinder to expand and to push the pistons in time.

But if you burned straight unprocessed vegetable oil, the fatty acids in the oil such as glycerol would start to congeal and coke up on the inside of your engine as well as in your fuel injectors eventually leading to big, expensive engine problems.

So it is necessary to process the oil to remove the fatty acids – making the oil more similar to diesel compositionally or to otherwise devise a system to keep your engine clean of residues from unprocessed oil.

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