Diesel Generators

Archive for March, 2009

I want to know if someone put gasoline instead of diesel in my generator. I'm use to seeing dark yellow fuel in it and now the muffler is red hot

I think you maybe right. The Muffler should not be that hot. Don`t chace futher damage, drain the tank and start over. Diesel cools and lubes the engine and Gas will destroy a diesel engine quick.

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I saw a fifth gear programme where they took cooking oil straight from the frying pan into a Mercedes, which ran for 200 miles with no problems, why?

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ANSWER IF YOU VALUE YOUR DIESEL GENERATOR'S FUTURE EXISTENCE!!!

IT CONTAINS ANSWERS BASED ON FACTS!! PLEASE DON'T SKIP IT WITHOUT READING IT!!!

First of all, cars whose engines changed to use cooking oil are called "grease cars"
.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greasecar

Secondly, the producers of Fifth Gear might have taken oil "straight from the frying pan" and used it to run the car…. but I'll bet you that they didn't tell you of the "itsy-bitsy" tweaks they made to the Mercedes's engine. Here's the reason why…

Diesel engines work by atomizing diesel and air to a high compression rate. This compression rate creates the necessary heat for the ignition and combustion of the mixture. Cooking oil is 10-20 times more viscous (heavier) than diesel. Therefore, trying to atomize cooking oil through the same injector made for the diesel will be like trying to spray butter through the nozzle of a perfume sprayer.

This viscosity problem has to be overcome first. It has been discovered that vegetable oil will achieve viscosity similar to diesel at temperatures of 160 F and higher. Therefore, a mechanism will have to be installed that will heat up the oil to above 160 F before being atomized through the same injector.

Secondly, oil tends to polymerize (turn black and stick) when heated slowly from room temperature. The operating temperature of the oil is 180 F. It means that, if the system is at 180 F and oil "straight from the pan" is introduced to the system, it will not polymerize. Therefore, the engine must have some sort of system to keep the oil heated at a temperature of 180 F. This temperature will solve both the viscosity and polymerization problem.

The engineering change that is employed is the following: have two independent fuel systems of diesel and cooking oil!! The diesel system (the smaller one) will be used to heat the system to operating temperature. The heat is distributed to the oil by using the coolant system to transfer the necessary heat. (Clever, huh?). Once the operating temperature is reached, the operator changes the fuel system from diesel to cooking oil and keeps operating with cooking oil. Once the operator stops though, he/she will have to purge the system with diesel fuel. That is because if he/she fails to do so, it will result the cooking oil to cool inside the injector and return to its original viscosity, thus clogging it. Then, the engine will fail to start the next time the operator tries to, since the blockage prevents the diesel from being atomized. Therefore, it is imperative that the last step be performed every time the engine is to be turned off.

Therefore, a diesel engine must have to be altered to accomodate the necessary changes before being able to burn cooking oil (more detail is contained in the link below).

http://www.frybrid.com/svo.htm

Therefore, DO NOT USE COOKING OIL IN YOUR DIESEL GENERATOR BEFORE CONVERTING IT INTO A GREASECAR ENGINE!! I don't know about diesel generator prices where you live, but where I come from, it's definitely not cheap!!!

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The diesel generator owes its roots to mainly two inventors. One of these is the creator of the first generator Michael Faraday and the other is the creator of the diesel engine Rudolph Diesel. The first of these two has contributed greatly to life as we know it today with all his discoveries in electricity.

Michael Faraday was of humble beginning but always had a curious nature. He was at an early age an errand boy for a bookbinding shop and here he vastly increased his knowledge as he read anything he could put his hands on. He was very interested in the concept of energy and force and this interest is one that continued throughout his life and eventually he developed into a famed chemist and physicist.

It was his discovery of electromagnetic induction in the year 1831 that led to the development of the modern generator. He used what he termed his induction ring to discover the electromagnetic induction. This was the generation or induction of electricity in a wire by the use of the electromagnetic effect of the current in another wire. This was the first transformer and followed closely with the discovery of the magneto-electric induction process which is the production of a steady electric current.

He attached two pieces of wire by the use of a sliding contact to a copper disc. He rotated the disc through the poles of a magnet and was able to generate continuous direct current. This was the first generator of time. This group of experiments led to the revolutionized generator that we know today.

The diesel generator however owes its development to the inventor Rudolph Diesel. He started off as a refrigerator engineer and eventually found himself working on many heat engine designs. He in 1892 put out a patent that dealt with the method and design of a engine where combustion would take place in the cylinder. He continued to work to this goal and was successful in the production of a diesel engine that produced an efficiency of 75%.

It is the coupling of his diesel engine with the generator that led to the diesel generator that we known today. His design was rather large and very heavy and found more use in industrial applications as a generator. They were used to power pipelines and for electric plants and water plants. Later on they found applications in the mines and in oil fields. The diesel generator is simply the coupling of the diesel engine with an electrical generator and has been use throughout history since its invention for many applications.

The diesel generator has been seen to be the choice of many of the larger companies as it is well suited for industrial use. A major discouraging factor for its use in terms of the retail market has been the fact that it can be rather noisy but this has been reduced greatly from the first diesel generators and is now almost comparable to the gasoline generators. These generators also offer other perks such as increase fuel economy and reduced maintenance costs which can explain their popularity in industrial applications.

John Stafford
http://www.articlesbase.com/automotive-articles/history-of-the-diesel-generator-71175.html