Album: The design diagrams.

     Album:Vegetable Oil Conversion:The design diagrams.

The basic system is derived off of what other people are doing, particularly RealEnergy in Sebastopol, CA, and it works like this:
  1. Collection
    I pickup oil at the restaurant using an heavy-duty pump with a metal mesh screen. The screen is just to get out large food particles. If the screen is clogged I just reverse the pump to unclog. The oil is dumped into the 210 gallon "dirty" tank.
  2. Cleaning
    When the oil is warm from engine coolant, I pump oil from the "dirty" to the "clean" tank through a heat exchanger and a filter using a 3gpm pump (reversible, though it's not going to be initially wired up to take advantage of that - this may change). The "clean" oil is dumped into a 60 gallon clean tank.
  3. Intake
    The engine draws fuel (and returns fuel) from either the vegetable oil clean tank or the stock diesel tank, thanks to some valves. Currently the valves are manual, eventually they may be switched to electric solenoids. After the engine is warm (and the oil is as well), then I can switch from diesel over to oil. Oil is collected from the "clean" tank and pulled through another heat exchanger and a smaller filter. Pressure and temperature fuel sensors give me an idea of the state of the oil system.
  4. Coolant Heat
    Coolant is tapped off the engine block and run backwards along the oil system providing heat to raise the oil temp and viscosity.
More info at my WVO Bus page.
Main Diagram
showing the conversion. The numbers are the pushlock hose size (in 1/16ths of an inch, related to pipe threading size which is 1/4" lower than the actual pipe inner diameter. Click again to see the full-size image. The clean tank ended up being 60 gallons and fits right next to the dirty tank, leaving a huge space to the side (for propane, perhaps?). Eventually I'll probably add an electric heat boost right at the solenoid to hit 180° in cold climates. ( comments)
Wiring Diagram
all of the SVO conversion wires. The SVO system is 12V, but the bus is 24V, hence the relay up in the drivers compartment. There are basically three bundles of wires: Engine to Cargo, Cargo to Batteries, Cargo to Drivers. There are a number of methods to get 12V from my 24V battery bank - for now I'll tap off of one of the batteries, but in the future I'll get a battery balancer or a voltage regulator of some sort, until then I'll just fuse the positive and negative so they can have voltage from ground. ( comments)
Album created by album tool from Dave's Marginal Hacks on Thu Jan 28 03:52:55 2016