[quote="heraclitis
I'll bite:

What is the source of the biomass? What is the feed rate and how well characterized is the incoming material?When you say catalysts are you referring to the cellulometaloid? What are the metals and how are they poised? Propanol is an odd end point for an anaerobic conversion, propionate is however the rate limiting fatty acid in most conversions, so what is going on here? Is this proprietary? What about methane? Is the process dependent on methanogenesis or do you actively divert the electrons? Does that involve the catalyst? Is the catalyst susceptible to poisoning? What size vessel is involved? Do you use a multiple stage process?

Inquiring minds want to know?[/quote]


Hmmmm....

As of the moment, yes, it would be a bit proprietary, but that doesn't mean that once I have the "new and improved" processor built and working, I won't release it as public domain. I diecovered it by accident, as many things are. It's a different type of still, but uses a fractionating condenser. Charcoal, coal or even graphite can be a slurry that works as a substrate.

The point is that it can make an alchohol that the government doesn't regulate... yet, I imagine. It is another use of biomass.

Metalocelluloid or cellumetaloid, is another material I've been working on for years off and on. I'm not the only one working on this.

Methane is okay, but propane is easier compressed and of course isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) is a storable liquid. You end up heating your home with a glorified alcohol lamp, or a refurbished kero burner.

The isopropanol isn't as fumey though.[/quote]

Methane is odorless? Propanol is not a common fermentation end product? At best you can achieve a small fraction of percent and it will invariably include larger proportions of ethanol which will co-elute in an separation technology the most common being distillation that requires energy input?[/quote]

No. Methane is not odorless. Propanol is no more odorless. If it's a new process application, then it certainly is not common. As of now, I want to say it is not a fermentation process, but I have a lot to learn about it still (no pun intended...). Typically we would start with propylene, but this is not the case. At first I thought it was a reaction between an acid with the original, accidental, polyethylene container, but after removing some to a beaker and putting that in a bell jar and that in a shallow pyrex dish, then all that in the freezer, I found ( 1.) it didn't freeze and shatter the beaker, but (2.) in the dish some isopropyl alcohol was condensing. That seemed odd, because IA has a much lower melting temp. I managed to get it to make IA without freezing, but it has to be adiabatically isolated from temps above 40 deg f. and produces best in winter.

I still have a lot of research to do on this. Hopefully yet this year I'll get a new (it may be incorrect to call it a ) digester built. It may be a chemical reaction takes place involving free radicals that attach to the IA as some other compund, then those bonds break at a lower temp.

Mostly I was addressing the biomass conversion issue. Biomass has more than a single definition you know...

BTW... sugar maple seeds I believe were the original source of the acid, since they were in with "mother nature's experiment." We may actually have something to do now with those pesky whirlygigs

Trust me, methane is odorless!!! At least I can't smell and all the people I have known around it could not smell it.

I thought you talking about biomass conversion. I realize now it is a plastic recycling project. Good Luck!

You are correct about methane. I was incorrect. It is the impurities in the methane I'm thinking of, as well as methanol. I don't know how you arrived at a plastic recycling project though. I would be more interested, as I mentioned, in producing more useful plastics from cellulose in lieu of oil. In a sense, burning wood in a Ben Franklin stove could be considered "recycling plastic" if we consider that creosote has many of its basic constituents.

it is like you (we?) want something good to come of all this. so how do we get there from here?
i mean keep the good part but yeah, what is the "don't mess with big insurance" thing anyway?

so anyway, i came across this article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html

and this
http://prospect.org/article/single-paye ... reme-court

for what they are worth

Ethylene, propylene, polypropylene are all plastics made out of oil. Even polycarbonates or what we commonly refer to as CD,s or DVD's are made from oil. Polycarbonates come from Pittsfield (or right down the road from the church sort of) MA. Got to love that. Currently all these plastic (as well as nylons and rayons and vinyls and styrenes) are all brought to us by oil. Some of theme are actually cool and fun to play with but they come from oil.

I tell you, come up with a way of converting cellulose to glucose quickly and you got a winner! Especially if you can start with unspecified cellulose and not those soft grass with no ligin (like Agnes referred to). Ligno-cellulose, that cellulose bundle joiner that pisses off all those trying to convert cellulose to liquid fuel! It is also the source of that nasty creosote.

Oh well, back to myths and such...George Will said:

They're going to decide -- try at long last to see if there is any limiting principle on the ability of Congress to act simply because it asserts that whatever they're regulating has a substantial impact on interstate commerce. If there is no limiting principle, then the Madisonian architecture of limited government is gone and the federal government has an unlimited...

Which goes back to what those progressives that Jafo hated so much did years ago!

Bizarro

It is my impression that lack of the single payer alternative is a concession to big Insurance. I could be wrong. George Stephanopilis had a pretty good over view discussion this morning.

Well Heraclitis,
Ethylene is not a plastic. It is a gas and doesn't solidify till -181 deg c. Oil is just a source of alcohols, just as gasoline is a mixture of alcohols. Many manmade textiles originated from cellulose as in cellulose nitrate or gun cotton, spun like cotton candy. Oil, in its abundance, simply replaced the fibroid materials.

As you say: Back to the myths.

Jefferson was not much different from any other pioneer. He could be compared to Stephen Hawking in that he forged onward into an idea that was conceived by others before him, but managed to demonstrate a variety of truths in no uncertain terms, convincing his supporters to make it the paradigm. The method did well for 150 years, but after that it became like Mitt Romney; out of touch with the classes below the rich. That has festered over the years and now every kid over 16 has it in his or her mind to overthrow it instead of repair it. Any president setting out to repair it will be met with opposition within it, since bipartisanism really isn't, as well as opposition from 7.9 billion currently diversified into chaos of one form or another.

Ethylene is a "plastic" monomer produced by the Petrochemical Industry by steam cracking of crude oil. Gasoline is not a mixture of alcohols. Gasoline is a mixture of small chain alkanes also produced by the Petrochemical Industry by a process called cracking. I have seen cotton fields growing and I am very aware of cellulose. In fact, I am sore from cleaning a bunch of waste cellulose from my yard this weekend and I wish it could be used for something other than compost (which takes forever because breaking cellulose down is a veeerrryyyyy sssllllooooowwww ppppprrrrrooooocccccceeeeesssss even if you turn it to keep oxygen inside the lump or burn it in the backyard fireplace, a quick process once all the water is displaced from the material (again a slow process).



I would not label Jefferson a Pioneer. Jefferson lived pretty much his whole life in the safety of civilization and spent an amazing amount of his time reading and debating the Enlightenment as well as applying himself to the study of agriculture and mechanical engineering (including his love of Architecture). Washington on the other hand was a Pioneer in many ways including trips into the Western fringes of society when he was 16 years old. In fact, he repeatedly returned to that region across the mountains and became quite a land speculator. He was known to treat the "back woodsmen or frontiersmen" with no small amount of disdain and actively used his power and influence to acquire large amounts of land in the Pittsburgh and southeastern Ohio regions where he was a despised absentee land owner of tenant farms. Also, in consort with Al Hamilton, he helped create and put down the first insurrection based on the treatment of the people in these nether regions by imposing an excise tax on Spirits. So, it seems, just as Britain was out of touch with those classes below the rich in the colonies; so the speculators and bankers were out of touch with that class below the rich in the newborn US of A. Even so, those dumb ass broke "pioneers" living in the presence of the Noble Savage (who for years had been supplied by the French ad British to kill Americans young and old for profit), scrapping a living off of tenant farms (many owned by you know who, Mr. President) with no where to sell their grain (couldn't send it downriver because the Spanish controlled New Orleans and the British controlled Montreal and god knows you couldn't haul it over those mountains), and nothing to do but ferment and distill their excess grain to make spirits for barter...even then, they pleaded to fix the system and not rebel.

I love the Petition of 1792 where those pioneers say:

That the situation seemed "contrary to the interest and happiness of these states being subversive of industry by common means, where men seem to make fortunes by the fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, rather than by economic, virtuous and useful employment." Further this frontier trash from the west said...."the constituting a capital of nearly eighty millions of dollars in the hands of a few persons who may influence those occasionally in power to evade the constitution."...This from a bunch of share cropper pissed about an excise tax on whisky in 1792.... you got to love it!!!!

The Merck Index describes ethylene as a gas in fact a common name for it is olefiant gas. You may be thinking of ethylene Oxide or "polythene." Yes, it is now commonly mass produced as a decomposition of petroleum gases. That is simply because of convenience and availability. Yes, gasoline is composed of saturated hydrocarbons, such as paraffins, but "to get the lead out" the octanes are raised by alcohols. Why do you think when you go to the pump it has a label reading "90% ethanol" and its octane rating.

Yes. Natural, uncatalyzed decomposition of cellulose takes a long time. Add a little NaOH to it and it goes a bit faster. Other methods and catalysts can speed it up even more.

Happy to know you do the composting thing. I never burn my grass clippings and leaves. All sorts of other uses.

Ethylene is a gas and it is manufactured from crude oil almost solely to feed the plastic market. It does occur naturally (pears in bags) but in very limited quantities. Ethylene oxide is very dangerous (don't F' with that). Gasoline is hydrocarbon alkanes. Paraffins is a common term but it is usually applied to large C-forms nowadays. Octane is based on the substitution nature of the alkane. Methyl substituted alkanes have a higher ignition point and 8-carbon tri-substituted alkanes (octane, oct or tend to work best in internal combustion engines. It says 10% ethanol at the pumps as a result of stupidity. Biomass conversion is not turning corn into alcohol, PERIOD. Big Agriculture, Big Oil and Big Petrochemical are laughing all the way to the bank while the environment suffers!

NaOh does not effectively degrade cellulose (NaOH will degrade anything but it is not a solution).

Celluosomes are really cool and Clostridium thermocellum is a really cool but hot tempered organism (if only Jimmy Carter's speech had been taken seriously).

Sorry kid, bullshit is no solution!

... and circles and arrows on the back of each one...

Sheep manure is considered best...

Neither one of us is intrinsically wrong here, but I think you are a bit rude with yoiur demeaning remark, in that if I'm a "kid" I'd assume you are surely around 95 or so.

This is your thread. I suppose it doesn't need to stray off into areas that peripheralize beyond Jeff.

didn't mean to be rude but BS is BS

i did not see the george stephanopoulis thing but it seems like this right here sounds pretty correct.
"It is my impression that lack of the single payer alternative is a concession to big Insurance."

... and sometimes people mistake other things for garbage, hence the circles and arrows reference. Most threads are reasonably proliferous. The discussion is about Jeff, but spawned comparisons to the incumbants of the last 50 or 100 years. Somewhere the discussion leads to what everyone has done wrong and GW, oil production and voila! alternative energy comes up. Lord knows I wish I'd never spouted off about a process I stumbled on in 2010 that heated my home reasonably well that ensuing winter without costing me much more than the time involved and tying up some garbage cans.

I've been very honest in all my posts. I even use my own name in lieu of hiding behind some narcissistic nick like so many use to fluff and puff their stature. My avatar is me with a fair repertoire of lab equipment. If you assess what I say as phoney, I'm going to assess you as delusional. If you assess the Merck Index, Boyd & Morrison, Baur, Faith, Keyes & Clarke, etc, etc. as phoney, I'm going to recommend a shrink for you. I think it's not silly, but stupid to go there.

There may be more than one way to skin a cat, but you can bet I'll find something to use the carcass for other than taxadermy.

I am just suggesting that the accuracy of some of your statements is a bit suspect, for example:

"Yes, gasoline is composed of saturated hydrocarbons, such as paraffins, but "to get the lead out" the octanes are raised by alcohols. Why do you think when you go to the pump it has a label reading "90% ethanol" and its octane rating."

Gas is 90% alkanes or the common term "paraffins" and nowadays you would be hard pressed to find it without 10% ethanol. The ethanol is added as part of a misguided "biomass" conversion scheme that is really nothing but a Corporate subsidy mainly because bullshit artists were allowed to define biomass conversion. (One of the reasons why I hate bullshit so!). Octane ratings are not based on ethanol content. Octane ratings are based on the type of alkane present with a high octane gas containing a high percentage of an eight carbon iso-octane that has ideal ignition properties (it takes a little more spark to get it to pop than other alkanes present). I guess I am delusional because I just don't respond well to BS and I tend to question things that seem questionable to me. As far as the name Heraclitis, I like it for thermodynamic reasons.