OT: Contaminated Kerosene Revisited- Need Help

I've never ever seen red kero before. in australia it has a blue dye.

if you water separate enough of the kero to get a heater fired up does it still gunk up?

if the separated out kero (as you show in the glass on the bench) is ok then maybe the answer is to mix all of it with water and centrifuge the mix as is done on industrial sites all the time. the industrial kit is called a cyclone and is used with two outlets one skims off the desired stuff and the other jetisons the waste to go back through the process.

you other thoughts about distillation warrants a comment. you should find holding the temperature easier than you think. as the mix reaches the boiling point of one of the components the temperature in the mix will stabilise until the component is boiled off then it will rise again until the next fraction commences boiling off. if you reduce the heat input as the boiling commences the boil off will slow and be more controlled.

condensing the gas can be done with a copper pipe coiled through a bucket filled with ice and water.

in making blown perspex canopies (where naked flames are a liability) the use of an electric paint heat gun or two is quite an effective heat source.

Stealth Pilot Australia

Red is the color used int the US to denote road taxes have not been paid.

Wes S

what is the flash point of kerosene?

Will you be distilling the kero under reduced pressure? According to

boiling point of kero at 1 atm is 200 - 260C. Autoignition temp is 279C.

Unless MathCAD and I got our sums wrong, I figure 1000 watts will heat from 25C to 200C and vaporize about 122 cm^3 /minute of kerosene, assuming that the system is perfectly insulated. At this rate, 265 gallons would take about 137 hours. It would actually be considerably more because the system won't be perfectly insulated. If your condenser is cooled by incoming kero then the process could be more efficient by recovering heat of vaporization, which is about 40% of the load.

Screenshot of MathCAD sheet available by email upon request.

Several sources I investigated variously list the boiling point between

150°C for the light grade and 250°C for the heavier grade. All do not specify, so I assume at 1 bar. I was th> >

sent.

What is lecthicin? wikipedia has no listing of it.

Thank You, Randy

Remove 333 from email address to reply.

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:43:28 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, Randy quickly quoth:

Har! I caught him spelling it "lethicin" last month and now you caught him with this version. It's actually spelled "Lecithin" and it's the good little guy in egg yolks which keep the cholesterol down when it hits your system. It's an anti-oxidant and fat emulsifier.

--- -If thy poster offends thee, *PLONK* it out.-

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

the unknown green material is probably the dissolved lining material.

in aviation we use a sloshing compound to seal the interiors of rivetted tanks (often just internal space in wing structure) the stuff is impervious to everything except alcohol. alcohol additives in fuel can cause similar contamination of fuel in an aircraft.

all of the discussion to date has regarded distilling as a method of separating the material. (btw I'd only ever do this with an inert atmosphere around the liquid. argon, nitrogen or even CO2 would be ok but dont raise the parafins to boiling in an oxygen environment)

what happens when you freeze the mix?

if you stick a bottle of the fluid in the freezer do the contaminants settle out as the temperature drops? it is worth an experiment. btw label the bottle as 'toxic contaminated kero'. you dont want the wife cooking with it.

Stealth Pilot

Nice web page, JR. Right now I have no idea what the green stuff is. Did you try extracting with water alone first, multiple times? Did you just do one water/alcohol extraction or more than one? Multiple extractions with smaller volumes of water do more good than one extraction with a large volume. I was going to suggest putting the kerosene in the freezer next but someone beat me to it. Kerosene is a mixture of hydrocarbons with a range of boiling points which is why when you look in different sources you get different numbers. If you do a continuous flow distillation like you propose you will boil off the lighter fractions and concentrate the heavy stuff in the pot - not really what you want to achieve. I'm going to post your web url in sci.chem in hopes someone there can help (there is a chemist who goes by Uncle Al with a wide range of knowledge whom I hope will chime in).

-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl dott ijames aat verizon dott net (remove nospm or make the obvious changes before replying)

Okay. I got one reply from Uncle Al in sci.chem, which basically said distillation is the only answer. Here it is:

Push come to shove, distill the kerosene. Lecithin is a good emulsifier. One presumes the tank barrier coating ("paint") was made to resist water and polar materials, and is therefore dissolved by non-polar kerosene.

You have a nasty mess in there when water arrives. You have organic-soluble crud that cannot be removed by water extraction. Either distill the kerosene (waste of energy) or plant to swap fouled burner elements.

Clean a tank before filling with something radically different. Automotive fuel system elastomers, seals, and hoses were formulated to resist non-polar gasoline (e.g., nitrile rubber). Enviro-whiner bullshit oxygenates (e.g., MTBE) devastated the fleet. Stuff was replaced with very expensive fluorinated elastomers or metal where possible. Majorly adding hygroscopic and corrosive Enviro-ethanol to gasoline will destroy fuel systms throughout this great nation double-quick. We must destroy America to Save the Planet. Hush! Do I hear China laughing its 1.5 billion Freon-cooled yellow asses off?

For us Earthlings, the boiling point of a liquid is usually the temperature at which the partial pressure of the vapor above the liquid equilibrates to one bar.

I say 'usually' because I suppose there may be weird liquids with weird properties or other definitions used for materials that boil well outside of the range of normal terrestrial conditions, but for pretty much anything you buy in a bottle or can, that relationship applies.

The material seems to behave like a glaze or glass.

But what you see is not necessarily what is in the kerosene. It may be the ash left behind when the contaminant itself is burned. ISTR that a high sodium content in coal causes problems by lowering the melting point of the flyash so that it tends to foul the boilers, much like the effect you describe.

I would be rather concerned about breathing whatever else is produced when that contaminated kerosene is burned.