[Stoves] water hyacyth and combusting plastics in briquettes/ biochar + retort carbonization
Dr.Ch.ADAM
scda2 at t-online.de
Wed Jun 28 16:55:09 CDT 2017
Dear All,
in Kenya near Lake Victoria, Kisumu, Mark Lung and his team
(http://www.eco2librium.net) are successfully carbonizing sugar bagasse in
4 “adam-retorts” (www.biocoal.org) and they are producing briquettes for
fuel with the charred bagasse.
In 3 weeks’ time we will try to carbonize sun dried water hyacinths in one
of the retorts to test how suitable hyacinths are to be pyrolysed in this
retort? The carbonized biomass is intended to be used as biochar.
The Project was initiated by Prof. Dr. Dr. Helge Böhnel / Institut für
angewandte Biotechnologie der Tropen, Universität Göttingen e.V., Germany
and Dr. Joerg Rengel will also come to Kisumu to assist with the
carbonization.
Up to now we could not find any budget and we are doing these tests by our
own pocket money and taking our private holidays to do this work.
If everything goes well we intended to propose a project on the shores of
Lake Victoria and start producing biochar from sun dried water hyacinths,
also the aspect of producing briquettes for household fuel will be taken
under consideration.
Unfortunately we could not find a donor for such a project, we wrote many
letters to giz, Unesco, EU Delegation to Tanzania and the EAC, EU
Delegation to Kenya, Foundation myclimate Zuerich, Executive Secret Dr. Ali
Said Matano-Lake Victoria Basin Commission-East African Community, etc.
If anybody has an idea which other organization to approach- please tell.
Best
Chris ADAM
-----Original-Nachricht-----
Betreff: Re: [Stoves] water hyacyth and combusting plastics in briquettes
Datum: 2017-06-28T10:30:54+0200
Von: "Michael N Trevor" <mntrevor at gmail.com>
An: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves"
<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Let me check. As I understand briquettes were sent to NZ or Australia for
burn testing
On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 8:20 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com> > wrote:
Dear Michael
I am interested in the claimed ‘no problem’ for the glue thing. Who said
what about which product?
If you know of someone who knows of someone let’s track down the source
story. It is a perennial question so a proper answer would be helpful.
Thanks
Crispin
From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org
<mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org> ] On Behalf Of Michael N
Trevor
Sent: 28-Jun-17 15:25
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.
org <mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> >
Subject: Re: [Stoves] water hyacyth and combusting plastics in briquettes
Dear Richard delighted to hear from you. Thanks for you detailed
coverage and I hope other find it useful and can apply it. The waste
company here was still doing just cardboard and not even that for some
time. The market sort of collapsed after someone bad mouthed them as a
hazard because of the glue in cardboard. Actually they were sent out and
tested and were given a clean report safety wise.
On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 6:54 PM, Stanley Richard <rstanley at mind.net
<mailto:rstanley at mind.net> > wrote:
Hello Michael,..
Many years ago in the Shri River at the outlet of Lake Malawi and again
up in Uganda near the outlet of Lake victoria we experimented with the
use of water hyacinth as a fuel for briquettes. What we learned was that
the hyacinth dries up to almost nothing in a few days once picked in the
dry season. Drying it out completely will leave the fibers brittle and
any disturbance such as blending with other resources before
compression, renders it into dust and crumbs which are pretty much
useless unless bound by other functioning plant fiber material. However,
if kept wet then chopped they can be great for binding up other more
energy-dense & lower ash residues e.g.; sawdust, select leaves &
grasses, charcoal dust and crumbs etc.,
We were unimpressed with the burn quality of the fiber itself though. By
itself it tends to smolder. Again however using it as a binder to
encapsulate more combustible materials such as mentioned above, they can
be quite useful.
Michael, I have seen lots of woven articles baskets rugs etc made out of
the fibers but have no direct contact with any of them.
Re., the utility of burning plastics in briquettes (presumably of the
wet process type we tout), a little story
In seeing the national flower of Mali jokingly described as the
plastic shopping bag, I inquired about its potential and were similarly
cautioned by many on this list about plastics combustion in general. We
also discovered however that both Swedish and British professional
institutional waste management sources recommended its
incineration—under controlled conditions— as being less harmful than
dumping them into a landfill. What then emerged through our group was
the advice that polyethylene, the key source for the shopping bag- a
relatively simple short chain hydrocarbon, which can be burnt rather
leanly if combusted above 400 deg c ( about 750 deg fahrenheit).
Two simple indicators of polyethylene are in, apparently in the way it
burns: no black smoke and the way it smells: the smell of a simple
paraffin candle burning. (these and a few other means of making simple
field identification of the types of plastics are found through a simple
google search).
Armed with this , I made several attempts to incorporate the plastic bag
into the briquette —-as it turned out, part of a month long consultancy
in Bamako Mali many years ago..
What I learned was this:
1) The plastic bag has to be shredded in, most commonly, a hammer mill
to assure fine wispy shards of cornflakes-sized strands. The reason is
that wet process briquettiing we tout, requires a relatively porous
structure after compression and initial dewatering, in order for the
retained moisture to emigrate from the briquette.
2) The shards themselves must be really wispy-- with lots of torn edges
The resulting fibers need to function as binders, encapsulating other
combustibles (paper /sawdust /leaves/ grasses /straws etc etc).
Simply cutting the plastic bags into small cornflake sizes will not
suffice as such merely hinders binding and greatly retards moisture
emigration.
If you have a way to shred them per above you can quite easily
incorporate as much as one 7 to 9 gram shopping bag into one 4” dia x 3
“ tall briquette weighing 125 to 140 grams dry (at ambient moisture) .
This is potentially really interesting because:
On average ten to 12 of the above sized briquettes are required per
family per day in a marginalized urban or rural setting. That same
family of five persons living in mid to marginalized conditions,
consumes about three of these poly bags per day, thus potentially
generating a real demand for the shopping bag where the above other
resources are in short supply.
There are about of course several other cultural, social or economic
reasons why it may not work in your own area but in Bamako the lack of
acceptance had nothing to do with any of these: issue had little to do
with culture or economics but rather the politics of foreign aid. I
discovered that the good aid officials already had selected an American
contractor for setting up a conventional garbage removal service. He
was a former aid official and I was just brought in to show that the bid
for the assessment was competitive for the books. The national flower of
Mali like many other places remains sadly, the plastic shopping bag.
Its perhaps your turn now, Michael !
Richard
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