Interesting. This may have something to do with the size oil droplets you're generating in that burner. Vegetable oils tend to be significantly more viscous than "diiesel" fuel, and typically require more preheat to burn properly (no soot, no deposits on walls of combustion chamber). Steam atomizing burners are very flexible, and will handle a wide variety of fuels, esp. with appropriate preheating. If you're burning oil on top of wood fire, of course, the burner can emit pretty large droplets and everything still works, since the oil will vaporize as it hits the hot coals in the wood fire.dhic001 wrote:Well we've tried hard to make vegetable oil explode, but it just doesn't happen. The same steam atomising burner will do it with smelly long-chain hydrocarbon on the same setting very easily. The resulting whoomph made all the floorboards jump out of the bilge. The vegetable oil just ends up coating everything and when it does light, just burns like any other fire. Of course it does take time to burn off, so you try and avoid putting the flame out for long periods, but with five different boilers in four different boats, we haven't had a vegetable oil explosion yet.
I know what fuel I'll use when i'm oil firing.
Daniel
Otter's burner and firebox will look like the inside of a metal melting furnace - just a blue haze against orange walls with bits of orange flame - once its up to temperature, which can take 20 minutes or so. This burner has no target, just tangential strike against the combustion chamber walls. I'll try and snap a pic of the burner in operation next weekend at the B & W meet.
- Bart