Faculty joins students to develop a new way to create earth-friendly energy source – bio-diesel. The Oregon State University faculty, along with their graduate and undergraduate students has made this new development using micro-technology. They have done this along with Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute researchers.
This environment-friendly effort is funded by ONAMI. This new creation will surely revolutionize manufacturing of bio-diesel. Professor of chemical engineering, Goran Jovanovic, serves as its lead investigator.
Jovanovic’s prototype design consists of a plastic plate with 30 micro-reactor channels running parallel to each other. Each of these channels is about the width of a human hair. The plate is of a size that the entire thing easily fits in the palm of a hand.
At the plate’s one end, there are two indents, one filled with alcohol and the other with oil, which flow down the channels, reacting and producing glycerol – a common ingredient in soap and bio-diesel.
Jovanovic said, One microreactor makes a small amount, but millions of them make a lot.
