EPA Biodiesel Mandate Get a Boost From Repurposed Imaging Equipment
by Jason Mick (Daily Tech) New method could repurpose existing equipment, improve the efficiency of biodiesel extraction
Biodiesel production tends to boil down (no pun intended) to one of two methods –repurposing waste oil to auto-capable fuel or converting purpose-grown feedstock crops to oily biodiesel.
Ultimately, only the latter method is capable of supporting biodiesel production on a broader scale. However, production tends to suffer from inefficiency due to inconsistent crop oil content and difficulty optimizing the seed-crushing machinery to deal with each harvest’s slightly unique oil composition.
But U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) research arm — the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) – has come up with an intuitive solution, repurposing near infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopy equipment — a type of chemical measurement device — to test the oil within seeds within an error of 0.5 to 0.73 percent. READ MORE



