From big blue tractors tilling fields to the signature orange utility trucks buzzing around campus, the University of Arkansas uses a lot of diesel fuel.
Turns out those chicken fingers at the cafeteria might be indirectly helping power the equipment that grows the vegetables and keeps the grass mowed.
“This kind of started as a recycling project, and it’s expanded into research,” said Ron Cox, assistant farm manager at the university’s Agricultural Experimental Farm, north of the main campus in Fayetteville. “We’re actually analyzing how this biodiesel works in the tractors.”
“We’ll get some hours on them with this formula, then test everything again,” he said. “After that, we’ll bump it up, hopefully all the way to 100 percent biodiesel at some point.”
Eventually, Cox hopes to run the farm’s equipment on biodiesel almost exclusively. As long as students keep eating on campus, a steady supply of cooking oil should be available, he said.
Using a trailer-mounted demonstration motor identical to the ones in the Kubota trucks, Sallee flipped between regular diesel and B20 without noticeable changes in sound, exhaust or engine speed.
Cox is still looking for a way to use the glycerol that’s a byproduct of the cooking oil conversion process.
“Right now, we’re composting it, but we’re hoping to find some way to recycle it as well,” he said.
