Concept of UVO Conversion

As you will read anywhere on the web concerning with diesels and vegetable oil conversions is that Rudolf Diesel, designed an engine (compression ignition) to run on peanut oil. (more at the bottom of the page)

This was forgotten about, when greedy oil companies could pump crude oil out of the ground and manufacture it into diesel and other fuels and make an absolute killing out of it - in more ways than one.

Okay thats enough of my babbling - The Basics are as follows;

Key for some of the terms used; UVO - used vegetable oil, WVO - waste vegetable oil

The basics of converting your diesel vehicle over to UVO consists of adding another fuel tank (for the UVO), a valve or valves depending on the situation, a CAV Filter (diesel one) and some source of heating.

You may ask why I need a heating source, well I’ll explain, vegetable oil in it standard state is quite thick and diesel, if you have poured it, is quite thin. The easiest way to make vegetable oil thin is to heat it, and the optimum temperature we are looking for is around 70-80C.

Now you are probably thinking why is this guy telling us how to do this? - well at the end of the day you’ll probably get hold of me or would like me to help you in some sort of way, and you are then going to or thinking about running your vehicle on UVO, and you’ll probably come to me for advice or to get parts, so either way we both win.
The way I prefer to heat the UVO is to use a Dual Coil Heater, the heating is supplied from your engine (water pipes from your radiator system) and once your engine reaches optimum operating temperature then the UVO should be hot enough to pump through into engine.

Ok I’ll stop here for a minute and re-cap

You’ll need to start on diesel and finish on diesel, cold UVO won’t run in your engine, So we start on diesel and wait until the engine is at operating temperature, then the system changes over automatically (if you have it installed that way) to UVO, the vehicle then runs on UVO and before you turn your vehicle off you change back to diesel, if an automatic system is used it is the same as having a turbo timer, once you turn the vehicle off the timer takes over and automatically changes the UVO back onto diesel and runs for a predetermined time (dependant on the vehicle).

That’s it - sounds easy? well it is. Now the only problem of course is where do you get your UVO from or who can you buy it from? Restaurants, Takeaways etc, some of these people will give it away for free and some will charge for it but either way it beats paying the price of diesel and of course is better for the environment. (no sulphur in UVO), and while I’m thinking about it, why make BioDiesel that costs you from $0.50 a litre to make and deals with Methanol and Sodium hydroxide, when you can install a system that will let your diesel run on UVO that may cost you nothing but time to get.

Also I better add, you’ll need some sort of way of filtering the UVO before pouring it in the tank. The best way of course is to pour the used Vegetable oil through a fine sieve or old sheet and then through a bag filter which will filter it down to 1-5 microns.


The Diesel Engine

"The diesel engine is an internal combustion engine that uses compression ignition, in which fuel ignites as it is injected into air in the combustion chamber that has been compressed to temperatures high enough to cause ignition. By contrast, petrol engines utilize the Otto cycle in which fuel and air are typically mixed before entering the combustion chamber and ignited by a spark plug, under which conditions compression ignition is undesirable (see engine knocking). The engine operates using the Diesel cycle named after German engineer Rudolf Diesel, who invented it in 1892 based on the hot bulb engine and for which he received a patent on February 23, 1893. Diesel had earlier experimented with the use of coal dust as a fuel in a similar design of engine. At the bequest of the French Government the Otto company demonstrated it at the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) using peanut oil. The French government were looking at using peanut oil for a locally produced fuel in their African colonies. Diesel later extensively tested the use of plant oils in his engine and began to actively promote the use of these fuels.

It is possible Rudolph Diesel was not first to invent the diesel. His patent (No. 7241) was filed in 1892.[1] However, Herbert Akroyd Stuart and Charles Richard Binney had already obtained a patent (No. 7146) in 1890 entitled: "Improvements in Engines Operated by the Explosion of Mixtures of Combustible Vapour or Gas and Air" which described the world's first compression-ignition engine.[2]. Akroyd-Stuart constructed the first compression-ignition oil engine in Bletchley, England in 1891 and leased the rights to Richard Hornsby & Sons, who by July 1892, five years before Diesel's prototype, had a diesel engine working for Newport Sanitary Authority. By 1896, diesel tractors and locomotives were being built in some quantity in Grantham. Importantly, Diesel's airblast injection system did not become part of subsequent 'diesel' engines, with direct-injection (DI) (as found in Akroyd-Stuart's engine) used instead, developed by Robert Bosch GmbH in 1927" ---- Wikipedia(2007), Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine ----