300KW waste oil burner.

[glort]

Not sure if this will be of a lot of interest to people here but thought I'd put it up anyway.

I have had this proclivity for waste oil burners for longer than I care to admit and actually got into the whole veg oil thing through looking for info if anyone else was playing with them. I have built quite a few now and put them to work for a range of things from heating veg oil for Bio making, re-powering gas hot water heaters, WVO drying, metal melting and even firing up my wood fired Pizza oven in times of Fire ban ( no solid fuel allowed).

The goal I had from the start was to heat my swimming pool. I have learned a lot as I have gone along building the different size burners and today got the burner going that I need for what started me out on this oily preoccupation.

I was aiming for around 220 Kw to use this with a heat exchanger I have. The new burner and big blower exceeded that quite well. best I have got out of the blower so far is about 200Kw but that was pushing it and the thing really was undersized for that output. Ran too hot, noisy and too much back pressure.
A bigger unit with a larger air intake was needed and today I fired my biggest burner so far up.

This was the very first run of the burner and I'm pretty chuffed how well the thing lit up and ran. After the paint burnt off the extinguisher bottle I throttled it up on the air and fuel and off it went. I can probably get a bit more out of it as I think it was still slightly lean. The fuel feed was gravity through an 8mm hose from a drum about 3.5 feet elevated. I'll stack up another milk crate and throw in some thinner oil tomorrow and see where I can get it.  A size up on the hose and copper tube I use to fed the oil in would probably help for max output but in reality it's doing more than I can use now.
The oil is just fed into the pipe the air enters and is blown in. There is no atomisation, it merely evaporates when it hits the red hot surfaces of the bottle. I preheat the burner with a bunch of newspaper, sticks and wood and some used veg oil .  I start the blower with the inlet closed off which still somehow give a good bit of air and when the thing heats up I add the oil slowly and off she goes.

After the vid I choked the blower intake right down for about a minute to let the oil pool inside a bit then opened it up. The flame became much longer and intensely bright and I thought the noise could well cause the neighbours to panic and call the cops or fire department as it had just got dark and the light was freaky with the noise. It still burned perfectly clean though ( while it lasted) so I think there is more to be squeezed out of this unit yet. :0)

I have another smaller one of these type burners I have put under a gas water heater and I was able to BOIL the 100L of water in a tad under an hour. Efficiency wasn't great for the fuel burned but it was pretty quick in heating the water.  With free fuel, efficiency isn't the biggest worry.
As well as being useful for off grid water heating, the other idea I had for the water heater was to run a circulator pump and have a radiator with a fan drawing through it for home heating.

I intend to make a "T" for the top of the big burner to disperse the heat output along the length of the 200KW rated water heat exchanger I have and use that to heat my  Pool. The idea I might look at is to take the pool heat right up in one burn every few days or maybe a week and then just have a pump circulating the water through a hydronic system under the house or outputting warm air through radiators.

[Honda lee]

Very cool, I don't know about kw when it comes to heat I have only used btu as a rating. I have been trained and have made my living as an hvacr tec .we would rate the amount of btu in a particular fuel and multiply  by the amount of fuel being used. Ie 1040 btu in natural gas or 2500 btu  in propane per cubic foot. That is a neat burner setup but with combustion going on inside the tank I don't think it would last very long without forming cracks. That is why all comercial  burners that I know about dont have combustion in the burner, and use an igniter at the outlet of the. Burner and then insulate the steel  or deflect  flame with a flame spreader.
I use a wood fired hot water boiler for my home heat and your desine might work if placed inside the fire box and insulate the box where the flame may hit the side of the box., and no problem with co but sooner or later the tank will crack and you will be shooting flame where not intended.
This dose give me some ideas. I have been using  wvo in my car and listeroid. I don't want to try WMO in my engines due to ash problems
I have found someone selling a dieselcraft centrifuge and has 500gal WMO I did not want the oil no use for it but I was not thinking about a waste oil burner.

                           Lee Wilson/ honda lee

[BruceM]

I think Ronmar uses a homebrew Babington type burner for waste oil heating.  I think that's the one of the best and most reliable of waste oil burners.  No worries about burnout/failure of a steel combustion chamber, either.

[Honda lee]

It looks like it burns real clean!

[thomasonw]

Very cool, I don't know about kw when it comes to heat I have only used btu as a rating.
             

I too am not 'familiar' with judging KWh for heat output, but according to some online calculators: a 300KWh burner comes to over 1 million BTUs!!!    Now, THAT is a mighty big number I can see!!!

-al-

[Ronmar]

Wow!  That is a lot of heat.  The problem with that big a burner is getting a heatex large enough to make use of it in the time it can be allowed to come into contact with the heatex transfer area...  Yes I use a small babbington burner and a 6' steel fin heat exchanger to heat my garage.  I have been toying with a vertical burner design in my little pea brain lately that may make fuel control a little less finnikey.  WIth the small size burner I am working with, fuel control is the hardest part of the equation for clean consistent burn. 

When delivering the fuel spray into a red hot vessel, clean burn is a natural result as the temperature is well above the breakdown temp of the fuel and it is completely broken down in the process.  the only drawbacks are that it can build deposits and you need a vessle that can withstand those temperatures without being broken down and consumed along with the fuel(ceramic or stainless steel)  A well areated flame front can deliver these same temperatures within the flame column without as many deposits and without having to drive the vessel to extreme red hot temperatures.  That is the biggest advantage of the babbington IMO, as it mixes combustion air in with the atomised fuel to develop a really nice flame collumn. 

[glort]

For the Kw/H challenged    it comes out to 1.25M BTU.
I understand KW better than BTU so always convert it back the other way.
Technically here in Oz, that's an illegal burner as anything over 1M BTU has to be annually inspected and certified.

You can see on my other Youtube vids that I have used this design before in smaller versions. So far despite one of the smaller ones probably having over 80 hours on it ( at very least!) it hasn't cracked or given the burner ( another Fire extinguisher bottle) any grief. It has burned a bit mainly due I think to me leaving the thing out in the yard and ran and weather and then the rust burning off, but apart from that, no problems what so ever.
This one is pretty thick steel and seemed to be pretty good quality as well. It was hard to drill but I could lay some real heavy weld on it without it collapsing and was easy to fill the gaps between the bottle and pipe. ( although I clearly missed a couple of spots)

I burned about 30 L in this thing on it's initial fire up and the insides of the thing were totally clean save for some loose " Clinker" at the bottom of the bottle. I always get that with any burner of this sort but if you turn the thing over  it will fall straight out leaving the bottle so clean you don't even get any carbon black off it.

As for WMO, I don't use it because the shite is simply too damn messy and stinks too much when you handle and process the stuff. I have an endless supply of it from my fathers wrecking yard and I guess I could process it there but I have been doing veg for like 9 years now and am not keen on going through another learning curve. Veg leaves ash as well but as far as I can figure it's blown out the exhaust. I'm a BIG fan of water injection on my engines though to remove any buildup and having broken  and found most of the rules of veg to be a load of rot, I have never had engine problems and put a lot of this down to the WI keeping the engine clean.

If all you are worried about with WMO is deposits, then I would say put a simple water injection system made from a windscreen washer bottle and a garden watering system plastic misting nozzle on the intake and you will NEVER have a problem.  after 9 years ( 10 in a couple of months) of using veg in multiple vehicles, I haven't had any issues despite not having run a heated system and running entirely on SVO all year round for years.

Wow!  That is a lot of heat.  The problem with that big a burner is getting a heatex large enough to make use of it in the time it can be allowed to come into contact with the heatex transfer area...

The HE I plan on using with this burner came from an Olympic swimming pool and is rated at 200KW.  I can overdrive it on the burner a bit and see if I get more heat out of it or just throttle the burner back to the 200KW mark. It's a BIG and bloody heavy HE. I plan on making an enclosure for the Burner and HE out of hebel brick which is cheap, easy to work with and has excellent insulating properties. Its good for high temps as long as you don't have flame playing on it which breaks it down but that won't be a problem.

I have been toying with a vertical burner design in my little pea brain lately that may make fuel control a little less finnikey.  WIth the small size burner I am working with, fuel control is the hardest part of the equation for clean consistent burn. 

I had the exact same problem and solved it a few weeks back.

One of the big bug bears to having any kind of stand alone burner running was fuel control. Using valves to control flow was just too inaccurate an when you did get it right, the level in the tank would drop and it would need adjusting again. I looked at peristaltic pumps but they seemed pricey here and getting one to fit the fuel flow I wanted, even variable ones seemed difficult as well.

I then found a cheap cycle timer on flea Bay. It's about matchbox size and has a setting for off and on. The min for each is a second and they go to 40 Min or something similar on the high end.
The timer has a relay with a 10A output for 230 to 12V so will drive quite a good load on it's own. There is a red light on the timer showing when it is powered up and a green one to show when the thing is activated. It has NO and NC contacts and can also be taped to alternate outputs Like 2 lights alternating and a constant on as well as output cycling. It's a bloody versatile unit.
There were no instructions but the board is pretty well marked and anyone remotely electrically competent will have no problems. ( That means if you are any of my mates that DON'T rock up to my place every time you want a new pair of driving lights or car stereo and amp wired up!!)


I use the Timer with a Pulse type 12V electric pump. This works great because I don't have to worry about gravity feed or the fuel level in the tank changing.
I set the on time for 1 sec and vary the off time to get the fuel flow I want. I worked out my pump was doing 10Ml a sec so I then calculated the oil flow I wanted in KW/H and set it up from there. You can do that by just powering it up ad watching the green light and listening to the relay click in and out.

This setup works great. First time Out I hooked it up, got the burner going and ran the thing for 8.5 hours straight without a hiccup.
I use brute and swirl type burners and while the intermittent fuel flow makes them pulse a little at real low outputs, at the end of the day you can control the heat output very well and quite accurately.

The only thing I have against the timer for my application on my small burners is I need fairly short cycle times and the trimpots are VERY VERY touchy. If I needed to vary the timing frequently and precisely, I'd take them off the board and replace them with something like 10 turn pots of the same value so the control was much less finicky. I have got a bit used to it now so no big deal and my burners are now more able to be put to work and be left alone ( relatively) than ever before.

THe timer is http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/300913030...84.m1439.l2649 and as you can see, costs less than $10 delivered.

I'm going to order a few more and use one on my lister stationary engine I run on veg oil to activate a water injection sprayer to keep the thing clean in the combustion chamber and rings while it's running .

The fuel pump I'm using was a wrecker $20 special and there are lots of pumps like it. It's a square Facet type pulse design. Pumps pretty thick Veg oil fats and uses very little power.

That is the biggest advantage of the babbington IMO, as it mixes combustion air in with the atomised fuel to develop a really nice flame collumn. 

The biggest disadvantage to them for me is the need to run a compressor. It limits portability ( which granted to most sane people wouldn't be a problem) and I think the air consumption for a burner this size would have the compressor ( depending on what you have) working pretty frequently. I have taken my smaller burners to Veg Oiler gatherings in parks and run the thing off a 12V battery to fire up the BBQ! 

The way this burner works there is an excess of air ( normally) so the output is completely clean.  I was standing in the heat blast ( about 10 ft back) and all I could smell was that warm air aroma.  There was no oil smell or smoke haze.  This is what makes me think the thing could still go harder although even when I have over fueled my other burners like this, they still have a totally clean output even when there is unburnt fuel puddling in the bottom that takes several minutes to burn off.

[d34]

Wow!  That is a lot of heat.  The problem with that big a burner is getting a heatex large enough to make use of it in the time it can be allowed to come into contact with the heatex transfer area...  Yes I use a small babbington burner and a 6' steel fin heat exchanger to heat my garage.  I have been toying with a vertical burner design in my little pea brain lately that may make fuel control a little less finnikey.  WIth the small size burner I am working with, fuel control is the hardest part of the equation for clean consistent burn. 

When delivering the fuel spray into a red hot vessel, clean burn is a natural result as the temperature is well above the breakdown temp of the fuel and it is completely broken down in the process.  the only drawbacks are that it can build deposits and you need a vessle that can withstand those temperatures without being broken down and consumed along with the fuel(ceramic or stainless steel)  A well areated flame front can deliver these same temperatures within the flame column without as many deposits and without having to drive the vessel to extreme red hot temperatures.  That is the biggest advantage of the babbington IMO, as it mixes combustion air in with the atomised fuel to develop a really nice flame collumn. 

Do you have pictures or videos of your Babington setup?