Week 7

     This week we finally began our experiments. This is much later than we had hoped to start, but we believe that we will be able to finish our experiments fairly quickly while still keeping them accurate. We began by air washing the crude biodiesel and then separating it into three equal amounts. One sample would be washed with water, one with Magnesol, and one with both. We started with the water wash, we added 1/3 of the samples volume in water to the sample and mixed it at 600 rpm for 10 minutes. We were running out of time by the time we were done mixing so we had to place the water wash into a separation funnel instead of the centrifuge. We wanted to avoid this because this means the water will have more time to clean the biodiesel (10 minutes + the amount of time it takes us to get back into the lab to remove the water) than the other mixtures, making its result inaccurate. After the lab we decided to make more biodiesel and retry the experiment, and the biofuel from this trail was properly disposed of. Our instructor also pointed out a number of mistakes we made (like not weighing the amount of biofuel we had before and after air washing so we know how much methanol we removed) so we will make note of these mistakes to make sure the next experiments are done correctly.