[Stoves] Wood Pellets + Coffee chaff + Rice Hulls

Thu Jul 11 15:39:38 CDT 2013

Paul Jock et al., 
Could not agree more about ease of ignition being a key determinant to marketability of the fuel / Stove package. We faced this early on with briquettes but find most will just break the first one up  and use it for  kindling. In your Tud design and others we've seen and tested however, fuel consistency seems to be the real need as you mention eh ?   Just add more paper to the blend or, something I have toyed with but frankly have not tried  myself, make a conical end to the briquette: viz;

Idea for a conical (igition end) shaped briquette is to induce just enought fuel to get it started and add more fuel only as it gets going --automatically,  for fast but gradual, smokless ignition. presumes briquette will be top lit starting at tip of cone,   or in case of side fed stoves, conical-end lit. the idea This idea  of course presumes that one would  ignite only the conical tip at first. Then as heat and draft builds, more and a larger volume  of fuel is ignited as lower section of cone  'super dries" and and warms to ignition temperature. In theory, we should see an  immediate but gradually increasing flame front to full exposed face  with relatively  smokless ignition:

(thanks to freebie 3d program, google sketchup).. diameter is nominially 4" od 1.25" ID exterior height nominally 2.5 to 3" with an  interior cone height of anything from 3.5 to 5" depending upon what you find works best for your blend and stove needs. Ultimately we would work out proportions for the blend or, maybe blend type does not matter at all and cone slope woudl be optimised at a consistent slope, independent of blend..
(Where are the grad students when you need 'em….)

I'll buy the beer for anybody who wants to try it out at the stoves camp and report back to the rest of us.

Richard Stanley
Ashland, Oreygun
NW US part of the Americas 

 Paul...
On Jul 11, 2013, at 11:13 AM, Frank Shields wrote:

Jock and all,

I think this is really key to getting the TLUD stoves on the market. It seems to me that when selling them in an area there must be prepared fuel ready to go along with it.
Making it fool proof and able to light with a simple match tossed in will go a long ways to getting people to using them.  Like the pressed fireplace logs wrapped in paper with the arrow printed to show the places at each end to light then walk away is what we might be able to achieve. Perhaps a press like what Richard Stanly produces to make a pressed fuel wrapped in paper that one can push into a Paul Anderson  TLUD and light the paper on top would work.

Thanks

Frank

Thanks

Frank Shields

BioChar Division
Control Laboratories, Inc.
42 Hangar Way
Watsonville, CE  95076

(831) 724-5422 tel
(81) 724-3188 fax
frank at biocharlab.com
www.controllabs.com

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan P Gill
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 10:12 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Cc: Jerry Whitfield; Marshall Webb
Subject: [Stoves] Wood Pellets + Coffee chaff + Rice Hulls

Friends,

Paul Olivier's recent post about layering wood pellets and rice husks got me to thinking.  As Paul has previously written, air channels thru a TLUD's fuel bed can cause problems.

Today, I mixed 4 scoops of wood pellets with 1 scoop of rice hull and 1 scoop of coffee chaff.  I then soaked some of this mix in alcohol for 5 minutes to use as the igniter.  Note, this ratio is only a zero order approximation of a balance between energy density in the fuel chamber and smaller particles as air channel blockers.

This worked very well in a TLUD with some gentle help for both primary and secondary air from a variable speed fan set at a low rate at the base of the unit.  The rice hull biochar was just lovely.  It passed Hugh's no soap test better than any biochar I have made to date. [Note to Hugh: I am dry quenching some of the results in a mason jar.  Would you like to see some of it?]

To me, this suggests that it may well be worth experimenting with various fuel mixes to minimize channeling in the fuel bed as this appears to improve the overall results.  Further, this gives a combined result with multiple carbon particle sizes.  Perhaps easier to get into the plant root zone.  If only applied to the growing mounds, we can avoid giving the weeds the advantages of biocahr.  Why help the weeds?  This strongly suggests that pyrolytic carbon [biocahr] may want to be applied in a very strategic fashion, not simply broadcast over the fields.  Forest application are probably another story altogether.  

I look forward to the results of more testing and evaluations.

Cheers,

Jock

Jonathan P Gill
Peacham, VT.
jg45 at icloud.com

Extract CO2 from the atmosphere. 

_______________________________________________
Stoves mailing list

to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org

to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org

for more Biomass Cooking Stoves,  News and Information see our web site:
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20130711/817dce4e/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screen shot 2013-07-11 at 1.14.17 PM.png
Type: image/png
Size: 137991 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20130711/817dce4e/attachment.png>