A recent study submitted by Howard Chase, a Professor of Biochemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, revealed a potential recycling method to convert the used and polluted engine oil obtained from the truck and car engines into useable fuel at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The process is said to have a good commercial value.
Conservative estimates reveal that changing of the oil in trucks and cars generates around eight billion gallons of used and waste motor oil annually world over. Currently, most of such used oil is re-processed into fresh lubricating oil or used as fuel in furnaces to provide heat to buildings. Some of the countries throw away the oil as waste or burn it indiscriminately causing pollution.
The submitted study indicates that Chase and his team of researchers have deployed an all new pyrolysis technology to recover nearly 90% of the waste oil into useable fuel. Instead of following the widely practiced pyrolysis method, where the oil was heated to high level of temperatures without the presence of oxygen to break it down into a combination of liquids, gases and small quantity of solids and then chemically changing the gases and liquids into diesel or gasoline, the new method utilized a microwave-absorbent material in the process of heating.
Unlike the earlier method, where the heating was uneven, production of gases and liquids and converting them into fuel was a problem. The new method mixed the sample oils with a microwave-absorbent material and used microwaves for heating the liquid and converted nearly 90% of the waste oil into fuel. The researchers have so far utilized the method to generate a mix of traditional gasoline and diesel.
The research report concludes that the microwave- based heating process offers increased level of opportunities to recycle the waste oil into fuel. It emphasizes its advantages over the traditional conversion method and details the potential of deploying the process for commercial level operations in future.
Source: http://portal.acs.org/