[Gasification] Size of blower and tumbler required to dry chip in asolar kiln

[Luke Gardner]

how big of a motor?
how many licks are there in a lolly pop?
depends on how long your tumbler is and how full you fill it, and slightly 
on how heavy you construct and how much you spend on bearings.
empty and full to the brim it would require very little energy  to spin.
the more you fill from empty the more energy its going to take to spin, the 
same as it would take more energy to spin by removing some from a choked 
full load, somewhere between full and empty there would be a point of 
equilibriium so to speak where there would be a max load to spin, where that 
is depends on the fluidity of your medium (chips) and any presence or lack 
there of internal "mixing fins"
It would be a very slippery slope to try to gain any real calculable 
numbers.
maybe another in the group may have a shot from the hip that comes with 
experience handling this medium in a drum, but my advice would be to.
1 build it
2 fill it to opperating depth manually
3 measure how much energy  it requires to spin manually at the speed you 
desire, then size the motor from that real feedback data.

Or default to a good oldie I like to say and do,
"There's no kill like overkill"
Luke Gardner




-----Original Message----- 
From: David Coote
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 11:30 AM
To: gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org
Subject: [Gasification] Size of blower and tumbler required to dry chip in 
asolar kiln

As well as large amounts of unused waste woody biomass Australia also
features a brutal summer in many regions as well as excellent insolation
over much of the continent for the rest of the year. It's instructive to
compare our peak sunhours (we have ~3GW of PV's installed ) against
Germany's (~30GW of PV's installed.) A bad site in Australia would be an
excellent site in Germany.

We're looking at several days around 40C in Melbourne this week after a
record-breaking period two weeks ago with 4 consecutive days over 41C.
Solar kilns can get very hot with this much insolation although this
can, of course, be managed with airflow. Managing timber drying in a
solar kiln requires some care to reduce checking etc but drying chip
would be less sensitive.

Perhaps someone on the list could give some guidance on the following
queries.

What size motor would be required to tumble a few meters of wet chip in
a solar kiln? What sort of temperatures could the tumbler motor cope
with if it was inside the solar kiln? (I guess the motor could be
outside the kiln.) And what size blower would be required to move air
through the rotating  mass of chip?

David

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