Hopeful Future for Vegetable Oil Fuels
Page 33
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
CCORDING to reports in the Tokio X Press, the Sino-Japanese war has spired the invention of a vegetarian Dtorcar. It appears that Akishige itsumoto, a 25-year-old Japanese gineer living in Shanghai, was so .ercome by patriotic fervour when he ought of his country using all its Ltrol for fuelling bombers that he tired into his workshop and six onths later came out with plans for a atorcar which, in the inventor's irds, " grazes on fruit and vegetables Ld digests chips of wood, making its ty across the countryside like a inkey, only quicker."
Japanese newspapers hail Akishige a combination of Edison and Ford, td predict that thousands of the new rs will eventually be on the road. ae Ministry of War and the Navy in ilrio are reported to be interested in a invention, and instructions are said have been issued urging the Japanese ople to instal the " grazing " apparas in at least 100 cars before the end the year.
Mr. Matsumoto's response to the enusiastic reception accorded his inVennt has, however, been somewhat dismointing, as no one has yet had L opportunity of seeing his vegetarian
e undergoing any practical tests. In ,y event, there is nothing new in nning motor vehicles on fuel derived ani vegetables, and during the past A' years British chemists have suessfully produced a number of such ternatives to mineral oil for the ternal-combustion engine.
Soya Bean Oil Proved.
Exhaustive tests recently made by e chief engineer of the transport de.rtment of a large concern in the idlands revealed that an efficient oil r motors can be extracted from soya ans. The soya bean can be grown in gland, and is, in fact, already being ltivated here, particularly in East aglia and Hertfordshire.
Moreover, there are large tracts of present unproductive ground ideally ited for the planting of the bean, rich grows rapidly. As the process extracting the oil is simple, the ,ility to produce from the beans large Lantities of fuel oils would be a valule contribution to national defence in e event of our normal oil and petrol pplies being interrupted.
Similarly, satisfactory results have en obtained from oils extracted from e following trees and plants; beech.t, chestnut, castor, cameline, grape, oundnut, hemp, linseed, lupin, maize, ye, pumpkin, pea, poppy, rape and ea. Any of these yield an alternative mineral oil which has shown itself to be quite satisfactory under normal operating conditions.
Vegetable oil, particularly that extracted from the soya bean, provides an ideal fuel for the compressionignition engine, but as yet its general use is not economically practicable, because supplies of refined heavy mineral-oil are so readily obtainable. Nevertheless, the vegetable oil has a number of advantages over the mineral variety, and many engineers are convinced that when the oil engine becomes more commonly employed a larger demand for the vegetable oil will cheapen it sufficiently for its greater efficiency to override anydifference in price that may then exist between vegetable and mineral oils.
Great Britain normally imports every year over 9,000,000 tons of oil products, about half of which comprise the petrol consumed by land transport. Home sources, such as the extraction of petrol from coal, yield little more than 6 per cent, of our annual petrol consumption of 1,500,000,000 gallons, and nearly 99 per cent, of the vehicles running on the roads of the United Kingdom are entirely dependent upon imported fuel.
Huge Military Requirements.
Petrol consumption must rise to unprecedented figures in war time, and it is probable that the Army and the R. A.F. alone will require 5,000,000 tons, our present annual civil consumption,
to prosecute a year's hostilities. Indeed. it is almost inevitable that the major proportion of all available supplies of motor spirit will be commandeered for military purposes, and there will be a serious shortage of the petrol for the industrial and civil transport essential to the maintenance of the Home Front.
There are, of course, home-produced petrol, made from British coal by the hydrogenation and low-temperature carbonization processes, which are ordinary first-rate motor spirits and are at present being used by road transport and aircraft. Unfortunately, however, turning coal into petrol is an exceedingly complicated process necessitating a vast and costly plant.
Then there is the use of coal -as a fuel for the internal-combustion engine in the form of producer-gas, which is a combustible mixture of gases made in a retort by burning in air an excess of carbonaceous fuel.
Coal, coke, charcoal or other suitable combustibles are broken into small pieces and packed into a producer, there to be converted into a gas to provide motive power for the ordinary internal-conSbustion engine to which
the producer is connected. In other words, the producer-gas vehicle manufactures its fuel as it goes along, the gas-making plant delivering a given amount of fuel according to a given engine demand.
Although obviating the elaborate and costly conversion processes entailed in obtaining petrol from coat, producer. gassuffers from the defect that the gasmaking plant carried on the vehicle weighs anything up to 7 cwt. Conse quently, it is of little use so far as private cars and other forms of light road transport are concerned, though it has proved eminently satisfactory for heavy vehicles, What is required, in order to relieve our dangerous dependence upon imported oils and petrols, is some fuel that can be manufactured easily from raw materials found in the United Kingdom, and that can be obtained without elaborate distillation plants or the necessity of equipping vehicles with heavy convertors. That is, the demand is for a home-produced motor fuel that can be stored, carried on the vehicle and fed to the engine as easily as mineral oil and petrol.
One Scottish engineering concern has recently developed an engine that runs on hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored in a steel cylinder carried beneath the vehicle, a single filling representing several thousand therms.
Possibilities of Hydrogen.
Known as the Erren, the hydrogen engine has already undergone extensive practical tests driving a car in ordinary traffic condition through streets in Glasgow. It starts easily, does not require decarbonizing, and, as there is no dilution of the lubricant, requires sump-draining only rarely.
When we remember that ammonia can be made anywhere from air and water, particular interest attaches to the claim by a chemist that he has discovered a method of running an ordinary petrol engine on ammonia gas. The ammonia is burned with air to give water vapour and nitrogen. This mixture expands and so drives the pistons of the engine.
However, despite the ingenuity of searchers for petrol substitutes such as hydrogen and ammonia, the most probable alternatives to mineral oils will be those derived from vegetable sources. Vegetable oil fulfils all the requirements of easy storage and feeding to the engine, as it can be distributed and carried in the vehicle in the same way as ordinary petrol.