[naturejab] shows off his solar powered pyrolysis machine which can convert scrap plastic into fuel. According to the video, this is the world’s most complex hand-made pyrolysis reactor ever made. We will give him some wiggle room there around “complex” and “hand-made”, because whatever else you have to say about it this machine is incredibly cool!
As you may know pyrolysis is a process wherein heat is applied to organic material in an inert environment (such as a vacuum) which causes the separation of its covalent bonds thereby causing it to decompose. In this case we decompose scrap plastic into what it was made from: natural gas and petroleum.
His facility is one hundred percent solar powered. The battery is a 100 kWh Komodo commercial power tank. He has in the order of twenty solar power panels laying in the grass behind the facility giving him eight or nine kilowatts. The first step in using the machine, after turning it on, is to load scrap plastic into it; this is done by means of a vacuum pump attached to a large flexible tube. The plastic gets pumped through the top chamber into the bottom chamber, which contains blades that help move the plastic through it. The two chambers are isolated by a valve — operating it allows either chamber to be pumped down to vacuum independently.
Once the plastic is in the main vacuum chamber, the eight active magnetrons — the same type of device you’d find in your typical microwave oven — begin to break down the plastic. As there’s no air in the vacuum chamber, the plastic won’t catch fire when it gets hot. Instead it melts, returning to petroleum and natural gas vapor which it was made from. Eventually the resultant vapor flows through a dephlegmator cooling into crude oil and natural gas which are stored separately for later use and further processing.
If you’re interested in pyrolysis you might like to read Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions.
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The vertical videos wouldn’t be that bad if they were centered in the column and about 50% bigger.
I think the vertical video trend has unfortunately increased, formerly due to stupid people who didn’t realize they could and should record the preferable in most cases 16:9 video format just by simply turning their phone 90 degrees, because it’s now the standard format of YouTube shorts and Tik Tok content.
It’s because you hold your phone upright, and the shorts are content made to be viewed on the phone.
Maybe I’m missing something but is there a write up of this project anywhere or this just a summary of a YouTube short and its transcript? Would love to know more about this project but all I see is an erratic run through and links to products used.
It looks like some local Gyro Gearloose from Chicago who’s trying to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel for “free energy”. From their youtube channel, it looks like the guy was experimenting in his garage trying to pyrolyse various stuff into fuel, and then got a $100k grant to build the big reactor.
You don’t usually get much in the way of reporting from these guys. They’re busy inventing and quite protective about their stuff.
The entire channel is “DIY plastic to fuel free energy” themed.
Also, “don’t watch prawn” kind of zealotry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upAo_S_PbQc 🤡
My bullshit detector goes off the scale on that one.
Also, after searching for “Julian Brown” I’m starting to get serious TempleOS vibes:
I think he needs help, not funding.
Net energy balance?
Deeply negative. A microwave magnetron is about 50% efficient so he’s wasting a ton of energy heating the plastic, but he’s not counting his losses because it’s “free” from the solar panels.
So, it’s a WW2 Holzgas technology, but with plastic and microwave oven parts? Wow.
“In Germany, around 500,000 gas powered vehicles were in use at the end of the war due to the lack of petroleum.”
They even had Tiger tanks running on holzgas and LPG
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/nazi_germany/gas-powered-fahrschulwanne-tanks.php