steam atomized waste oil burner in locomotive

[Dave57]

Greetings - I'm a long time steam railroader with experience in tourist railroads and railroad museums, and now planning an overhaul of a 1926 steam locomotive. The little railroad in question is a museum operation, and has been running a small steam switch engine on waste oil for several years now. The train has grown and we need a bigger engine - so, we're overhauling one.

We get our waste oil from CAT and CUMMINS maintenance contractors changing out oil in emergency generators. It isn't all lube though....other things seem to always find their way in.

The current engine uses a Van Boden Ingles style burner - a slot drools oil out that drops down in front of another narrow slot through which blows a blast of steam. The oil is blown into a refractory lined firebox and combusts, heat being maintained through the heat sunk into the refractory material. This style of burner is very forgiving of pretty ugly oil.....but not very efficient or clean.

I'm interested in technology to allow us to make the oil cleaner so we can perhaps use more complex and advanced burners to handle it better and provide us with more complete combustion.  I'm also wondering what other high output burners might be out there wautung to be found.......

Thanks and best wishes.

Dave

[Russ]

Wow, interesting story Dave57!

Things are pretty quiet around here right now. 

I think a centrifuge might be worth looking into.  From what I understand they can get the oil very clean.  I havent needed that level of cleanliness, so I havent looked much into them.  Have you checked them out at all?

Hope you can find a good solution for your interesting project.

Russ

[Dave57]

Thanks for the response - i've been pretty much limiting my investigations into passive technology like separation and filtration, but I will broaden my horizons and see about centrifuges.  My guess is a plant that already uses this technique might alllow us to borrow their processing foir a little bit of time every month or so.......I presume it is costly to capitalize for occasional use. Any idea which industries have large process centrifuges in use?

Dave

[Russ]

I'm not sure on using someone elses centrifuge.  I dont know how much money you are looking to spend, but I would think you could build your own system.  Here is a good video showing one of the smaller units you can purchase online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqqG2G6b8U

[Dave57]

Thank you....I think we're looking at a different order of magnitude. One batch for us - a tank full - is 600 gallons. So, I'm thinking an industrial process centrifuge rather than something we can fit into an oil drum.

Dave

[Russ]

Ahh yes, you have lots of oil to work with here.  From what I understand you can connect these devices to a tank and just let it cycle the oil over and over until it is clean.  Maybe you could hook it to a large holding tank and let it run for a while. 

The ones here range from 55GPH up to 300GPH.  Let them run for several hours and you could filter a fair bit of oil:
http://pabiodieselsupply.com/shop/waste-oil-centrifuge-c-100.html

Or bundled with a pump:
http://pabiodieselsupply.com/shop/oil-cleaning-centrifuge-motor-package/

I'm not sure if this is in your price range, but its all I can think to get very clean used oil.  They arent cheap, but at least the fuel is  .

[Dave57]

Interesting......there's a great difference in completeness of combustion when you can get clean enough to step up from an atomizing to a vaporizing burner. So far, the heavy industrial and waste fuel oils in locomotive application have been limited to atomizing, and the vaporizing burners in use have to burn refined lighter fuels - not recycled, from the oil dealers. The grungy stuff in the oil doesn't vaporize, so it stays behind and clogs the burner.

I'll pass this link along to our brain trust and see what they think.

Dave

[surplus 6]

welcome aboard, I have no answers to your questions as I am an oil novice myself. good luck with the steam/oil project.
Tony

[Dave57]

Thanks. I'm working on some ideas now.....the current thought is to see how clean we can practically an economically get the waste oil first, then see how much we can take advantage of its cleaner state to achieve more complete and efficient combustion. I don't think we can achieve vaporizing burner standards, but if we can'd do better than old atomizers I'd be very surprised.

Dave