Oil from invasive “weed” shows promise as viable transformer lubricant
April 22, 2010 by admin
The camelina plant has seemed to many North Americas nothing more than an invasive weed.
Taylor Henkelman, of Swan River, Manitoba, however, sees a valuable resource.
Camelina is drought resistant, doesn’t mind the cold, needs virtually no pesticides to thrive, crowds out weeds and could have a variety of uses as an edible oil with high nutritional and other health benefits and / or as a bio-fuel.
Taylor, 15, a Grade 10 student at Swan Valley Regional Secondary School earned a ticket to the 2010 SABC national finals by examining the potential of camelina oil as a coolant in electrical transformers.
Today the majority of transformers are cooled by a nasty mix of petroleum products and harmful chemicals – though many companies are beginning to switch to soy oil as an eco-friendly alternative.
Soybeans don’t grow well in northern Manitoba, however, and are relatively expensive. Taylor decided to test oil from camelina, under the mentorship of Ralph Wegner, an engineer at Carte International of Winnipeg, which makes electrical transformers.
Transformer coolant oils need to resist electrical arcing.
Says Taylor: “We placed two electrodes fairly close together in the oil and ran electricity into them. We kept increasing the voltage to see if the oil was sufficiently resistant (to arcing).”
More tests are needed but Taylor’s results were promising and he plans further tests to see how it stands up to the cold.
