[Stoves] continuously operating biomass boilers

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

On Mon, 2 Dec 2019 at 11:58, Energies Naturals C.B.
<energiesnaturals at gmx.de> wrote:

> do you know of any proven biomass boilers in the domestic and institutional power range
> (15 - 150 kWth) which also produce biochar?
>
Rolf

Some years back Alex English, who runs a large biomass chip stoking
furnace in Canada, posted on here his modification of said burner to
produce biochar.

He essentially cut the primary (under) air to the chain grate, so that
fresh dry wood chip fell onto the very hot chain grate where it
pyrolysed in the absence of under air and with the aid of radiant heat
from the secondary flame overhead. The hot char was then augered out
by the normal ash  removal mechanism and quenched and removed via a
water sealed auger IIRC, I hope Alex is still reading here to comment.

Following Alex's lead I modified the feed characteristic  of a Kob
500kW boiler with a walking floor grate by cutting primary air and
speeding up the grate and ash removal. My experiment made a char with
considerable ash in it but I couldn't sustain the experiment as we had
no outlet for the char.

Andrew