Lesson 3: Biodiesel: Alternative Fuel
For the Warm-Up, students will be presented with a table that has no headings but describes pipeline incidents and related injuries and fatalities. 40 They will predict what the data could represent. Teachers can only answer yes or no questions. This activity encourages students to look at possible trends in data and other details that may be of use.
Activity 1: Biodiesel: Alternative Fuel
Students will prepare for lab by gathering information on biodiesel (history, composition, prevalence, advantages and disadvantages, etc.). Students will make biodiesel from two types of oil (used and new). Encourage students to retrieve a variety of waste oils and label with the location. New oil requires 4 grams of lye per liter of oil, while used oil requires more depending on the quality. Students will determine by chemical analysis how much lye is needed for the old oil.
Activity 2: Biodiesel Math
Biodiesel has to be a specific pH, 8.5, but has a tolerance pH of 0.5. Students will use a compound inequality to describe the allowable range of the pH (between 8 and 9). Compound inequalities will also be used to describe fuel efficiency of cars which use biodiesel, crop production and sales of soybeans, and expected yield of oil content from soybeans. Students will use a quadratic model to maximize fuel efficiency of biodiesel and systems of equations to model and solve problems related to the production and production cost of biodiesel. Finally, students will evaluate the sustainability of a crop by calculating the energy return on energy investments.
A possible extension can include students analyzing yearly oil and biodiesel production statistically using mean absolute deviation, standard deviation and calculating the z-score for a certain amount of gallons. Teachers can use this opportunity to explain the difference between mean absolute and standard deviation.
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