Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 5, 2004|Volume 33, Number 10

Giovanni Zinn (right) sits in the green Chevy truck he converted to run on vegetable oil. Chemistry Machine Shop instructor David Johnson (left) helped him with the project to create a more environmentally friendly vehicle.

Yale senior starts to drive,
using vegetable oil as his fuel

Before he owned a vehicle -- and even before he had his license -- Yale senior Giovanni Zinn had some ambitious plans about how he wanted to drive.

A few years past the legal driving age (and therefore a rarity among his friends), Zinn knew he wanted to have his license before starting his senior year at Yale. He hoped to buy a truck so that he could haul away lawn and other debris from his yard. And he was determined to have his first vehicle be fueled by vegetable oil.

This past summer, Zinn accomplished all three of those goals.

A self-described "tinker by nature," Zinn began thinking last year about how he could convert a diesel-fueled truck into one that could run, in part, on straight vegetable oil. He was inspired by a program he had seen on public television about a Connecticut resident who had accomplished a similar feat.

Zinn says the project appealed to him on several fronts. An environmental engineering major, he wanted a means of transportation that would be useful for hauling but also be environmentally friendly. As someone who enjoys "taking things apart and putting them together again," he felt reasonably confident that he could call on the skills he had learned in the Department of Chemistry's Machine Shop as part of a course taught by David Johnson, a research support specialist in chemistry instrumentation at Yale.

Zinn had done most of his research on how to convert a vehicle's fuel system by the time he bought a 1986 Chevy C10 truck through the Bargain News in late June. He turned to Johnson, a motorcycle and car buff who works on both kinds of vehicles as a hobby, for help with some of the practical issues. The two began the manual labor of the conversion several weeks before the start of the fall term.

Essentially, Zinn modified the Chevy's fuel delivery system so that it would run on both diesel and vegetable oil. The truck has two fuel tanks, and the Yale senior, with welding and fabrication help from Johnson, converted the truck so that it can start on diesel and then switch over to vegetable oil after about 10 minutes, the time it takes for the oil to heat to an adequate temperature.

"We basically modified the fuel storage tanks and fuel lines as well as the truck's cooling lines," explains Zinn. "As it heats up, the vegetable oil -- which is very viscous and would just clog up the injection pump -- thins enough with heat to spray well through the injectors."

Zinn, who is from Hamden, gets waste vegetable oil from his family's neighbor, who manages a restaurant in town, and filters it. "I get about 15 gallons a week from him," says Zinn.

While there are do-it-yourself kits to convert diesel-run vehicles to ones fueled by vegetable oil, Zinn notes that the kits are expensive, ranging from $600 to $800. He spent under $500 for his materials and supplies. He gets the vegetable oil for free, which is also a boon to his neighbor, who had previously paid a company to pick up the waste oil.

With the vegetable oil, Zinn's green Chevy gets the same gas mileage as a strictly diesel truck, approximately 15-20 miles per gallon. But there are environmental benefits to using vegetable oil over diesel fuel, he notes. His vegetable oil-powered truck emits less particulate matter, environmental pollutants in the air from cars and other emissions that contribute to asthma and other respiratory health problems. There is a high incidence of asthma in New Haven, Zinn says.

In addition, the vegetable oil contains no sulfur and therefore does not emit sulfur dioxide, which contributes to the problem of acid rain.

"The smell of diesel is also a lot more noxious," adds Johnson, noting that odor of the vegetable oil is not unlike when "something burns on the stove."

In addition, like Zinn's neighbor, restaurants and other institutions serving food now pay people to come and cart off their waste vegetable oil. "All of that waste can be tapped into to create energy in an environmentally friendly way," he says.

Zinn credits Johnson for giving him the assistance and support he needed along the way, and says he doesn't think the first start-up of his converted Chevy would have gone as smoothly without his instructor's help.

"When the truck switched over, it didn't even hiccup," Zinn recalls. "It idled the same.

"Without Dave, I know I would have messed up somewhere," he adds. "I asked him about 1,000 questions: how to disconnect this, how to connect that, where to put the various pieces. Most of what I learned during the process I learned from him."

Johnson agrees, "There were a few times that I had to calm Giovanni down a bit, and tell him that we could successfully accomplish this."

Among the first people to ride in the newly converted dark green Chevy were the Yale student's parents, Robert (a Yale professor of astronomy) and Graziella Zinn. On that trip, the car stalled when turning a corner -- causing a bit of apprehension for everyone -- but quickly started up again.

Now that he has converted a truck, Zinn is considering other ways that vegetable oil can be used for energy. He and Johnson have talked with various Yale administrators, as well as with faculty in engineering, chemistry and other fields, about the possibility of converting the heating systems in some Yale buildings to vegetable oil as a cheaper and "greener" alternative to home heating oil. A likely site for an experimental project is the University's Bethany Observatory Station, where Johnson works as a caretaker.

"Imagine if we could heat our homes and commercial buildings with the waste vegetable oil," says Johnson, who already has approval from Yale Dining Halls to tap into its supply of waste vegetable oil. "The question is whether oil burners are too sensitive to deal with the viscosity of the oil. But we do think that there is a lot of potential, and that's what we are now exploring: How cheaply can we make some existing Yale buildings greener than they are?"

Zinn says that he is equally excited about exploring environmentally friendly energy sources, bolstered by the confidence he has gained with his first success.

"This is opening a lot of doors for me," he says. "My initial idea, to convert a car for my personal use, has snowballed into grander ideas for new projects. It has given me a way of doing something practical with what I am studying and practice what I've said I believed in."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Yale scientists honored for their research

'Future of Animal Law' to be explored

In Focus: Epidemiology & Public Health

Yale senior starts to drive, using vegetable oil as his fuel

Grant to fund study of long-term effect of drug use on teenagers

Electronic records may improve care of children with asthma

Kaplan honored with election to the Institute of Medicine

Lecture to look at 'Iraq and Shadow of Vietnam'

Janet Reno to be keynote speaker at Law School symposium

Study: More exercise programs for breast cancer survivors needed

Partnership bringing together U.S. and Russian organizations . . .

Study: Risk of developing disabilities rises 60-fold . . .

Concert Band will stage 1943 Glenn Miller radio broadcast

Calhoun College to host talks by poet and Yale World Fellow

New tree a symbol of support needed to fight cancer

Campus Notes