[Stoves] Charcoal from waste - home cooking or other markets? (Re: Crispin, Anand Karve)

Anand Karve adkarve at gmail.com
Thu Oct 6 00:30:22 CDT 2016


Dear Ken,
I looked up the sites quoted by you but I found the process to be quite
complicated, using a lot of very elaborately designed hardware.   When you
mention "charcoal gas", do you mean water gas (CO + H2)?  Water gas is
relatively easy to produce. One can demonstrate its generation by
introducing a small amount of water into a burning charcoal fire. As soon
as the water hits the charcoal, a blue flame emerges from the fire.  I was
told that water gas can also be used as fuel in an internal combustion
engine.
Yours
A.D.Karve

***
Dr. A.D. Karve

Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)

Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Ken Boak <ken.boak at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Dear Crispin, Anand, and stoves list,
>
> Regarding waste charcoal and other uses of charcoal fuel:
>
> I have recently restarted a project I was first involved in back in 2010,
> which is the production of a biomass gasifier for village scale power
> generation.
>
> This involved the conversion of a Lister 6hp engine to spark ignition to
> allow it to run on syn-gas from a wood chip gasifier.
>
> My experiments were conducted at a workshop held at All Power Labs, of
> Berkeley, California,  in February of 2010 and later in Spring of 2012 -
> when I was fortunate enough to be working at APL for six months of 2012.
>
> During that time myself and a team of fellow enthusiasts converted the
> Lister to spark ignition and proved that it would run at the elevated
> compression ratio of 17:1 - as common in small diesel engines. This allowed
> the Lister to perform well on syn-gas without the usual loss of performance
> associated with running a standard low compression engine on gas.
>
> Since the initial experimental phase, I have come to believe that the
> woodchip gasifier is a hard beast to tame, and that a charcoal gasifier is
> a much simpler and forgiving technology and better suited to construction
> and operation and repair - particularly in the rural setting.
>
> So this opens up the question of supplying charcoal in a form that is
> compatible with the gasifier and in a quantity that satisfies the demand of
> village scale distributed heat and power systems.
>
> The solution that I am currently researching is a charcoal gasifier that
> has a pre-pyrolyser - as a means of producing the charcoal as an
> intermediate fuel from assorted biomass.  The pyrolyser is initially driven
> from the waste heat of the diesel exhaust and supplemented by the heat from
> burning the pyrolysis gases, volatiles and tars - which otherwise would
> potentially cause a problem later in the valve gear of the diesel engine.
>
> Whilst some say that converting biomass to char is wasteful in terms of
> energy, and also prone to generating high levels of noxious pollutants,
>  the solution of having a closed torrefier, closely coupled to the charcoal
> gasifier, that consumes all pyrolysis gases - and makes the associated heat
> available for other purposes - such as water heating, drying, roasting,
> cooking, boiling etc  reduces the pollution to a minimum.
>
> It also allows a wide range of otherwise "difficult" agricultural waste
> products to the converted to charcoal fuel in a form that can be used for
> running the converted engine.  This includes the leaves, tree trimmings,
> nut shells, husks, stones/pits, sawdust etc and any other wide variety of
> waste products to be converted and used effectively as fuel for heat and
> electrical and/or mechanical  power for running small agri-processing
> machines
>
> In my estimation somewhere between 1.5 and 2kg of dry biomass will be
> needed to produce 1kWh of electricity using a charcoal gasifier.
>
> For every kWh of electrical power produced about 4kWh of high grade waste
> heat either as hot air for drying or hot water at 60C + will be available.
>
> For those requiring a refresher on the design of the charcoal gasifier - I
> recommend a paper from 1942 "The Making of the Kalle Gasifier"  submitted
> to the list by Tom Miles nearly 10 years ago
>
> http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/kallegas
>
> Additionally for small scale charcoal gasifiers made from scrap materials
> - I suggest Gary Gilmore's design from 2010/11 - which is described in a 3
> part YouTube series
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srLETKDrwto
>
>
> And from 2013 - his Simple-Fire gasifier
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJXdaCQ6uQ
>
>
>
>
> regards
>
>
> Ken
>
> London
>
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