How can I determine the amount of nitrous oxide in home made bio-diesel?
I am a high school student working with limited resources on a research project to find additives which will reduce the concentration of nitrous oxide in emmissions from homemade bio-diesel. I cannot afford equipment, but I do have access to my high school’s chemical stores.
Check your local service station to see if you can borrow an emissions meter. In the US, automobiles must be inspected each year for various emissions; the service center has a pipe that goes into the exhaust pipe of the car and senses the pollutants. I would think that NOx would be one of the sensed pollutants.
Simply go to any place which does emission testing on cars. Have them test your car with regular fuel and another time with your bio-diesel.
I doubt you will be able to pull this off any other way and your school’s chemical supplies will hardly have the necessary equipment to do gas analysis. Not to mention that the test has to be done under well defined dynamometer (that’s the thing the car runs on during the test) conditions to have any validity at all.
And then, why re-invent the wheel if you can have it for $100 done in an hour?
NOx detection uses a process called Chemiluminescence which uses a very sensitive light meter to quantify the amount of light given off by a chemical reaction between NO (Nitric Oxide) and Ozone (O3). The light is generated by a chemical reaction between NO and Ozone to produce NO2, during this chemical reaction a photon is emitted in the near IR.
NOx exists as a mix of NO2 and NO. In order to get an accurate reading all of the NOx the NO2 must be converted to NO as NO is the only component which can be detected.
Conversion is first done by heating the sample to a high temperature . After heating the sample the nearly pure NO is combined with Ozone at a specific rate and concentration. The resulting IR light generated is measured . The amount of light equates to the amount NOx
Unfortunately this type of measurment is well beyond a homebrew cheap solution.