An Interesting Design For Constant-Flow Charcoal / BioChar Production..
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ส.ค. 2022
- Charcoal is made by cooking wood without air - pyrolysis. But how to make it continuously? Well, here's an idea for you..
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A great idea, Tim, with the potential to harvest either the waste heat from the chimney to heat your home/drying chamber, or the gases from the pyrolisation (as others have said). Rather than an auger, a continuous double chain with angle-iron welded across to make a conveyor would have the rollers and bearings protected from the heat, plus the structure could all be made of blocks, rather than a steel cylinder. Really looking forward to what your inventive mind comes up with!
This is actually an excellent idea. Also, there shouldn't be a need to drop the charcoal in water if it spends enough time traveling through the tube past the hot point. A long section of aluminum tubing after the heating chamber point should be sufficient for heat dissipation. If it's long enough, it should sap enough heat from the charcoal for it to exit safely without ignition. You could also add a water cooling tube spiralled around the aluminum tubing section to accelerate the cooling process similar to water cooling the CPU in a gaming computer.
An idea for stopping the charcoal combustion on the end would be to extend the pipe with the auger so that the charcoal has time to cool down before it exits the tube. It would require a quite long tube and auger, but if you only heat a third of the pipe it should work, this way you dont need to change the whole system, and the motor would also be placed further away from the heat....
Agree. Rather than waste the heat have the hot charcoal proceed along another tube that is adjacent to the original tube with the charcoal chips transferring heat to the original tube. So that the output of the tube is now by the input hopper of the wood chips.
Ok there are issues like transferring the charcoal for one tube to the other and sorting out the proximity of the still hot charcoal near the wood chips in the hopper.
Spraying water on the super hot charcoal could be risky as that is one of the processes of making ‘town gas’ in the old day where it generated hydrogen.
Your continuous charcoal process is an excellent idea and will have challenges definitely worthwhile.
@@percymerlin If you put the second pipe+auger below the first, the charcoal could fall out of the first down into the second, which then pushes it back the way it came, with the heat rising up to the original auger. If the second pipe was longer or shorter could dump out the cooler charcoal further away from the input hopper. However I'm not sure recovering the heat would be practical. You'd either have to remove insulation below the first auger (allowing heat to escape), so the residual heat could travel from the bottom auger up to the top auger, or put both augers inside the insulated box, which over time would cause the second one to head up to the temperature of the first, defeating the purpose of having the second cooling auger in the first place!
I'm not sure there's an easy way you could passively cool the charcoal while also putting that heat back into the system. However Tim was talking about using waste heat to warm his house, so maybe that's the way to go.
@@Berkeloid0 I agree with your thinking. The heat transfer needs some serious thermal workings( to put it technically 🤔) . Since I do not know the distance between the kiln and the house that could be a serious driver. While nowhere near all the heat could be transferred from one pipe to the other it could act as a prewarmer/ cooler. Then there would the issue of a heat exchanger to then transfer the heat to another medium to be piped to the house using insulated pipes. A serious cost consideration. Maybe the compromise is to extend the auger like you say but have that pipe wrapped in a heat exchanger to cool the charcoal and the hot water to the house.
It is a fascinating project, where I personally feel there will have to be a lot of compromises just make it work. The auger bearings being a biggie. Needing to have something that works over time and losing out on the bearing friction.
I had this idea too. You could even have a tank of water surrounding the extended auger tube or a high-volume fan blowing air on the auger tube (with fins) to facilitate cooling.
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Islam literally means ‘submission to God’ and it teaches us to have a direct relationship with God.
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It also teaches that God is nothing like a human being or like anything that we can imagine.
The concept of God is summarized in the Quran as:
{ “Say, He is God, the One. God, the Absolute. He does not give birth, nor was He born, and there is nothing like Him.”} (Quran 112:1-4)
Becoming a Muslim is not turning your back to Jesus.
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Look into process tunnels. Generally these are inclined to use gravity, with paddles inside to agitate the process material. They're generally more reliable in these environments than augers.
I was thinking something like a chain pump would be good
We have one at work for activating lime that uses gravity and rotation to carry the spent lime from the cooler feed end down to the firing end, cooking it along the way
I was just about to mention that… we have augers in our boiler ash systems and they jam super easy. A rotating drum would work significantly better
I fully agree that particles need agitation in order to allow full exposure and escape for gases
We already tried that design. My Dad build a continuous Retort system. Go look at Hive Carbon in South Africa. No moving parts inside the combustion chamber is best. We build it vertical. Its all about the time exposed at a certain heat. My Dads system had been proven and been working for years now.😊
Tim - have you thought of a chain-conveyor instead of an auger? It might be more practical and would not have the potential to crush the friable charcoal like an auger.
By chain conveyor, I mean a simple, fireproof conveyor belt made of a series of loops of chain welded together in parallel to make a wide belt.
Edit: This idea would utterly fail to exclude any oxygen, but would at least roast the wood quite nicely.
Just put it in a housing and that solves the oxygen exclusion issue
I don't know the word in english, what I could find is scraper floor. We have them on our manure trailers for instance. 2 chains running in parallel with a U shaped iron profile across them every 30-50cm. The chains are driven by a shaft with special pulleys on them that grip the chain links.
I would try to find an old manure spreader trailer and salvage the parts needed.
@@schwuzi I’ve never heard of s scraper floor but your explanation is simple enough and it sounds like a good idea
If the charcoal output were under water it wouldn't suck air up in it. In order to get O2 down to the charcoal end of things it would need to suck water in and train the tank or push bubbles down and suck air in through the wood chips hopper, neither of which I see as being realistic unless forced.
@@awesomecronk7183 don't forget, the pressure inside the reaction chamber will be higher due to the release of water vapor and gasses as well as the heat from the furnace. I don't believe that it would suck up any water. The issue with water is that charcoal tends to float
I would go with a closed retort and capture the flammable gasses in a gasometer for later use.
Yes, the gasses could be usefull for running a gasengine for all sorts of purposes, or even be used in a furnace for heating elsewhere.
Also the kresotoe/tar and other byproducts might also be an idea to collect, especially when made in larger quantities.
You could possibly use it to run a locomotive
Can people please stop this obsession with the locomotive!
@@andrewreynolds4949
No.
@@andrewreynolds4949 no!
Love your basic design and thought process. One minor thought, there may be some benefits to putting the auger motor on the cooler end. You probably already thought of that. I’m enjoying watching your charcoal plant evolve.
or use a chain to drive the auger to keep the motor far away from the heat..
Best with motor at feed end
Good work Sandra Tim
Sounds like a good plan. How about your insulation in fact being your sand heat storage battery? You could redirect the chimney through your sand battery too to heat it up. If you do regular production burns you’ll be charging your sand heat storage battery every time you use it. In the winter you can direct your house heating circuit through the sand pit for winter heat and even have another circuit for hot water!
Robin
Lovely stuff Tim!
here's hoping you get this all up and running :}
It seems very promising!
Merciful goodness this man's brain does not stop churning. Lol. What got me was I could follow all that he said. I amazed myself. Well done Tim. Good health and blessings to all ❤ and be safe.
When I saw the work you were thinking about doing for this I got all excited. Then I saw you ALREADY tried something, that really got me. I know the feeling of starting something and it not working fully and having to go back to the drawing board. That really resonated with me Tim.
I joined the Patreon to help fund your content. You don't push water bottles, try to get me to be a shadow legend hero. No you just want to dry some wood to heat your house, and as a bonus? You're doing it with a railway.
Really hope others come around and we can turn that 200 Patreons to 2000!
Yes, I just saw you'd joined up - that's brilliant. Thanks, Charles!!
Dear Mr. Tim
I guess a slightly angled rolling tube oven like the ones used in cement and lime producing factories could work for charcoal too. Please kindly allow me a suggestion: Maybe you should look how charcoal is produced by big facilities at first instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again. Maybe the professional solutions can be simplified and scaled down of course.
Best regards, luck, health and wisdom.
Agreed! How do the professionals do it?
He did show some pictures of large charcoal production kilns at the beginning
One of the best channels i've found lately, i'll try to recommend you
Make it as Archimedes screw instead of an auger. You can then turn the pipe from the outside. With the plasma cutter it should be easy to make. Cut a pipe in half and weld the dividers in place and bolt the pipe back together again. Using a set of metal rollers there would be no bearing problems because of the heat.
If you made a sheet roller like, the pipe roller, you could make a pipe in any dimension needed. 🙂
A moving part inside a very hot pipe will have a lot of problems. It will easily warp and bend if any wood get stock. I now from test that the combustible gas part have a enough heat to complete the charcoal when the process as been started. So you only need some extra fuel in the start if the gas is used efficient. You will need a fairly good seal at the intake to force the combustible gas out. This can be done with a rotating feeder so that the top is never open directly to air.
Exactly. This design, along with things like a slight slope should do it. Blockages are an issue, as you mention, but a lot of that is preventable by feed speed. It also helps to be able to reverse the auger to clear blockages.
Brilliant idea! As others have pointed out , the key thing is to make good use of the heat produced.
Fascinating
I can’t wait to see how you work through this.
Frank
Sounds great but what about some cheep steel drums that you could have on a sort of chain drive device that they lay on in the cooker and you can roll out the burnt ones and roll in the new ones they should be sufficiently sealed and could probably be vented easy and could put agitation lumps in the barrel to make sure they all move around well.
Hope fhat makes sense.
I like this idea, kind of a 'batch conveyor' with barrels, in a larger tube.
I love your thinking Tim. I have been making bio-char in our firepit with my odd sized firewood (we heat exclusively with wood) during weekend campfire happy hour. It's amazing how inefficient a teepee lay fire is at completely combusting the wood. I douse the fire with water when the wine and cheese are gone and screen and crush the charcoal the next day.
Excuse my ignorance, but why do you crush your charcoal. Wouldn't it be powdered at that point?. Do you then compress it into a cube, or what?.
@@Matt-wb7lm Crushing the charcoal helps increase surface area making it easier to innoculate with living micronutrients. After inoculation, the crushed biochar is added to the garden soil, which is a great benefit to the soil food web. Biochar also sequesters carbon for thousands of years, something we desperately need to be doing.
This is a very interesting topic. I can't wait to see and hear more.
Wow, ambitious plan for the new furnace. Hope you make it happen Tim.
You have all the best toys.
Your continual inventiveness amazes me.
Its an intresting design and would be fun to see it in action or atleast a test
This is amazing. I was thinking through most of the video "but would it work?!" And then you show the old prototype! Of course :^D I love it!
interesting concept! excited to see how you go about it
Thank you very much for sharing your design. Many questions occur to me, but they deserve much further thought first. But this is fascinating to consider, thank you
Good effort..
Sounds like a great idea. Curious to see what you come up with next.
What an interesting idea. You are incredibly creative and persistent...
Love the design. The auger could drop it into a big pile of ash. That is how Japanese binchotan charcoal is cooled and smothered after reacting with oxygen.
I can't wait for the project to start
Lots of clever people here in the comments, I loving this discussion. Looking forward to the next installment Tim!
It is at this kind of time I wish I had paid attention to my thermodynamics and heat transfer lecture (or have a better teacher perhaps...) as I really want to try doing an analysis of such system and give helpful design suggestion. Can't wait to see you build and finish it!
I can't wait to see you build your next next charcoal machine!
A.) You should absolutely try and salvage what you can of the old charcoal-cooker, saves money and the suggestions people are making for protecting the bearings/motor are brilliant
B.) Will you have some sort of way to access the inner working of the cooker so you don’t have to cut away a bunch of material?
For cooling, you could use a second auger that is separate from the one in the flue so the heat doesn't transfer as easily. Plus you could have it rotate horizontally at the inclosed transfer point and be able to make separate piles or fill separate holding bins by moving it back and forth.
In Austria some heating systems work with "Wood chips" (Hackschnitzel). The experience has shown that a square "pipe" for the auger will do wonders. I don't know if that will help you. But for your curiosity look at "Hackschnitzelheizung".
I will - thank you
Great idea, with this type of design you could easily add another auger to feed wood chips into the fire as well
charcoal factory !! cool !
Interesting! Need a steam boiler over the fire one day to run a compressor for air to power the train. Heh heh.
Fascinating! This looks a lot like a type of heating furnace that was popular in Vancouver about 120 years ago.
Rather than making charcoal, an auger fed sawdust into the furnace which could be fired by coal, wood or charcoal. Once hand started, the auger was steam driven--about as close to a perpetual motion machine as one could get!
Of course, that's no what you're after designing, but I thought the similarity was interesting.
About the spontaneous combustion of the charcoal at the end, instead of cooling them with water. Drop them into a airtight box. Well, airtight in terms of incoming air. Need some pressure relief. But then you can cool it by preheating the air that goes into the blower. Put fins on the box and draw the blower suction air past them.
Also, tip the augers down so that gravity assists.
Finally... stainless steel! Haha expensive yes
When the auger is longer you can create a cooling section after the burner.
I have been thinking about a design like this for the last two months. I thought about augers like you used from my farming days and thought the bearings and motors would cook. Chain augers with stainless steel could work. I also thought about a modified grain drier with a very wide chain feed. A rotary crusher at the end with a sprayer to cool the Charcoal could work and seal the system. Designed well the feed stock could heat drive a turbine!
Could you use a chain conveyor or a the some like that. Basically attach a large steel circle or square on to a cable or chain and pull it through the tube or box. That way you can keep the bearings away from the heat as well as the drive motor. It won't plug either. You could use flat bar welded together to make a square tube and a paddle wheel to pull the chain. Good luck
I love this idea, I am experimenting on a small level, made my first two charcoal briquette blocks yesterday. Experimenting with added sawdust.
I am studying civil engineering part of our job is identifying a working system and optimising it, this usually leads to keeping the design, but losing material or makong maintenance less, sometimes this process leads to even better results. I would like to work on this as a side project, students are poor, we need to keep things cheap.😊
I found some solutions to your issues.
You get high heat bearings that can withstand 350 degrees, if the issue persists the tube could be made longer, giving the tube heat time to dissipate.
The motor that is too close to the heat, that can be put anywhere away from the heat by either extwnding the shaft or connect via a change to but it above or below the shaft level.
In order to get efficiency level up, the whole hestimg enclosure shoulf be close up with at least 3 heating sensors to monitor temperatures. They are fairly cheap and with a little bit of studying and researxh you can set up a program to help with it. Though getting the motor to change rpm relative to your temperature is different story, I think it can be done with voltage or amp restriction, need to ask an electrical engineer, I do civils.😊
I've seen the larger machines, they all do it in bulk rather than a continuous line.
So the question as ro why needa to be assessed, cause this setup seems better, but it is not really utilized.
I wonder, if you used saw dust to get charcoal powders. Then you cook rice, or some potatoes in water to make a starch glue if you could pour the charcoal powder in to get larger clumps. The saw dust would work better with the auger.
This channel is just a hidden gem. I really envy your life, so if any land in Ireland is for sale let me know!
Auger can move materials better than paddle,they make the tube inclined because material can not move effectively if tube is in level position.cheer!
50 gallon drums filled with charcoal and slap lid off to snuff out the oxygen. Then move the drum and repeat. The charcoal factories do this with a large dump container then close it off and let that charcoal cool. Then they just start up another one.
I wonder if a large rotating barrel (like a big tumbler or old cement mixer) could be used and done in a similar fashion without needing the auger (as per suggestion below)
Hopefully the motor turning the screw is powered by the furnace heat. Good idea.
Some societies in Asia build their beds on the furnace pipes for warmth and in house heating in the winter.
A nice idea...the charcoal could drop right in a water bassin...
Biggest Problem is the loss of energy...so if there would be a use, it would be much more thrilling for upscale.
There are only three channels I have clicked the bell for. This is one of them.
Maar heeft u het ook gebouwd?
@gerardvriend729 Not yet. Ive just used my fire pit to make charcoal
Interesting 👍😃
Very interesting.
You truly are a thinking man bro, give it a month and you will be able to buy one on amazon, lol. Enjoyed this video. Safe travels
I LOVE it!!
I’ve been working ideas for this kinda system to go into my Tesla Turbine Electric Generator because it can handle solid particulates fuels!! 🤤🤤🤤
This is exactly what I needed! Great idea!
Cool stuff, as always :)
Great creative thinking. Do remember that at these temperatures the fire would quickly eat through the steel innards. A common problem with rocket mass heaters that were made with a steel flue. It just corrodes away very rapidly
Alternative: not auger-in-tube, a look-alike water wheel but metal, turns slowly in metal container outside of which passes combustion exhaust (hot). Heating fuel is the volatiles boiling off wood chunks (chips not required, but small enough to fit in wheel chambers) which are ducted out of metal container into firebox. Forced air no, construct tall chimney which creates vacuum.
I think you are really close with this design. Extending the augur tube on the exit side some distance would allow it to cool.
Also, drawing the intake air for the forced air down across the cooling part of the charcoal exit tube might help cool the charcoal below the spontaneous combustion temperature.
I sawnutwiss's suggestion of a chain conveyor might be cheaper
Yeah, counterflow air! That would be neat. Could maybe figure out a way to “entrain” the Pyrolysis gas or syngas or whatever it is called from the end of the auger into that airflow to allow it to burn more towards the entry.
Brother, believe me when I tell you I have a foil hat, slide rule, and a big imagination, so this is not from judgement or kicking you in the shin for inventing and trying to make the world a better place.
This would be a tough one, variations in the wood, the volatile compounds contacting the steel under heat, with the friction constantly removing the scale that protects it from further corrosion....timing, one end of the batch may need more time than the other, so speeding up or slowing down, one part gets under or over cooked.
All the bugs you mentioned can certainly be worked out, but you would need a titanium auger, I don't think coated would work as the heat cycles would cause separation. I've worked in coke plants, big money, big resources, hundreds of ovens, even with a much more consistent fuel.
Neat idea, you got a whole stack of better ones, that are definitely worth sinking time and money in.
so it needs to be continuous, bearings away from heat, forgiving for chips clogging, safe AND cheap. what an awesome challenge.
use one of the two spirals that you already have, try to find a metal tube that fits nicely, weld shafts to the auger in the straightest way possible so the bearings can be mounted away from the heat. and go with this design that you just showed us, minus the holes on the top of the pipe, the moisture and wood-gasses should have a way to exhaust next to the feed, in a form of a pipe. at the receiving end you make an airtight catch tank for the coal
Or set up a gentle water sprayer to cool the charcoal, could be done with garden hose and a spray nozzle
They already make this exact machine. Worked in a factory with 3 of them many years ago. It's use to make liquid smoke flavoring.
Really interesting topic. I'm a non native speaker. Cooking wood to charcoal, i wasn't aware of yet.🖖
Some ideas
You could use cement or brick as the insulation material and then run pipes with water through the insulation, and then use those hooked up with radiators to heat a building. You could also take the wood gas that comes off of the charcoal process and use it to power your locomotive for your railway I know in the 30s and 40s people would power their cars with wood gas stoves.
In the company where I work we develop a similar system for 2 years now. We heat the reactor auger with elektricity, the combustable gases are sucked out and processed, so they can be used in an engine or heating...the hot coal is cooled in a second auger with water jacket...the motors are far away from the augers and power them via a chain drive.
Great idea Tim for the charcoal, I was thinking about CARBON GRAPHITE BUSHINGS FOR HIGH TEMPERATURE as the melting point of Carbon is 4099°C plus they can be cheaply made to order, most likely any place that sells them will have something that will suit your needs.
Can’t wait
I expect that one day we'll see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang come out of your shop. Please?
If you wanted to do a continuous process, I'd use a slanted pipe with a rotary airlock on each end. I'm not sure if it would pass your wood chips though. If the output end had a water jacket, that would both solve the ignition problem and also heat the water for your house.
I guess i’m not as stupid as people give me credit for ! When seeing the plan my very first thought was that the exiting charcoal would combust.
I think the simple answer would be to have the exiting material furthest from the heat source.
As for bearings, shielded, not sealed & they would need high melting point grease in them.
If you make a short bearing tube with a bearing in each end you can then remove the shield from the inside of each bearing & push fresh grease in via a nipple between the two bearings.
You could look into cooling the charcoal the same way I condense poitin by using icy water. I used to have a freezer full of icy water, 12v pump from a quad weed sprayer and cooper coil the pipe from the freezer around the the hot pipe cooling it instantly. Ran everything on a silent generator.
I may have a solution for a possible cooling chamber. Once you have the conveyer system through the hot zone sorted, you could use the auger as a cooling tunnel of sorts.
Have the hot charcoal fall into the auger and the journey through should cool the charcoal. Furthermore, the density of the charcoal shouldn't jam the auger. If a piece of charcoal happened to get caught, the auger should pulverize it and continue on. Of course, this addition would also add considerable length to your operation.
I love all your fascinating projects, but I'm especially looking forward to this one. Especially since you have used the scientific method on a previous iteration, you have insight to build on! I wondered if the chute could be shorter if the auger (or chain) went slower. I'm also curious about the chance of woodchips getting jammed at either end since they're not uniform in size. I'm sure the post-chipping loading operation have you insight into how these "flow". Can't wait to see the next steps! Cheering you on from Oregon!
Thanks, Jennifer. I think this worked better in my head than in reality, so I'm going for simple next : - )
I worked on the design of the control & safety systems for a medium sized pilot plant 20 years ago. It was the same principle, using an inclined rotary kiln, with a rotary valve at the hot end for the feedstock. But it was self sustaining once the coal started to gas off. It ran for a number of years before it was mothballed. Quite a dangerous bit of equipment actually.
Was it for making charcoal?
@@wayoutwest-workshopstuff6299 it actually used coal as a feedstock to make coal char. Same but different.
You can eliminate the auger with a vertical/diagonal pipe that is fed from the bottom and empties into a box in the bottom. The rate that you empty the box at the bottom controls the flow rate (rotating flap maybe?). This also allows capturing wood gas coming up the pipe, and since heat rises the charcoal at the bottom can cool off before exposing it to oxygen. you could Even add a water jacket around the collection box and above it, giving you hot water to heat your home.
Nice design, you might want to put the furnace on the same side as the woodchip intake so the main pyrolysis take place in the first section and cools as it reaches the end.
Also, instead of having vents along the auger to burn the gasses you could collect them! Just have a an exit point off the top of your auger before the end that goes through a long pipe to cool and condense the less volatile products, bam you got wood vinegar. If you have a wider pipe, a smaller auger or put some holes in the auger blades so the gasses can go around and then narrower near the end so they are forced to escape earlier.
If you don't have the vents in the auger you could surround the whole auger with a furnace because you could limit the oxygen and it shouldn't matter how small or how long the chips spend in the auger as long as you can limit the oxygen!
You can dry the woodchips before entry with the combust gases of the furnace. instead of focusing on a single combustion chamber with a mekanism to move material within, you can have three stationary chambers. One firing, one cooling down & one heating up with the combusted gases. Then you can have a rotary mekanism to feed woodchips & collect charcoal from/to hoppers respectively.
A solution for the continuous process would be to push lidded containers through the heated chamber in a conveyer system. Completion of the process could be determined by testing the internal pressure at the outflow pipe. The containers could then be cooled before emptying and reusing.
I like this idea, maybe a number of metal ammo boxes (from Harbor Freight) moved thru maybe 2 55 gallon horizontal drums with a chain transport. Maybe version 1 could be a manual wheel. Not really continuous unfortunately. I keep wanting to "purpose" existing recycled stuff like old water heaters, etc - anything to justify me buying some new tools. LOL
its a good idea but you will have issues with tar build up. pyrolytic reactions like this produce a lot of byproducts, such as methane, nitrogen monoxide, carbon monoxide and dioxide etc. powering the flame from wood gas is far more sensible and this kiln will produce copious amounts of it to feed the fire. in general you'd use around 40% of your wood gas powering the reaction. a vortex separator on the outflow will sort a lot the tar and gas problems out.wood tar is a commodity to be sold or fractionally distilled.
use excess wood gas to heat your house etc
I would put the motor at the wood chip end because it would be cooler. The charcoal exiting could drop into a sealed container that has copper pipes inside to help the charcoal cool before reaching the air. This cooling chamber would need a baffle to help with priming, but one it had its first batch the cool charcoal at the bottom would keep the new hot charcoal from reaching enough air.
It’s a very interesting almost ingenious design but I’m curious how you plan to stop creosote from gumming up the auger since creosote is extracted from the wood in the charcoal making process and can condense inside the auger or smokestack, also you could theoretically replace the bearings in the auger with metal shielded ones and connect the augers to the line drive which would eliminate the issues with what you already have with it and potentially make it viable to continue with the old design
I think sheerly via high temperature was the plan; have them stay as vapor and combust with the secondary air and/or get thermally cracked into more volatile hydrocarbons and/or syngas (which would do the same) and/or petcoke.
Granted a good clean once in a while is always nice!
@@ericlotze7724 I was talking about on the screw of the auger which is theoretically the coldest part as it’s furthest away from the radiating heat and has charcoal sliding along it which would absorb heat from the screw as it passes by as well, but now that I’m actually thinking about it that is a very valid point it should easily stay in a gaseous state so long as he can keep enough heat throughout the entire system, the main times he’d have issues with creosote is upon startup and shutdown so as long as there’s enough heat still in the system he’ll never have an issue, thank you for your insight it helped clear up the one thing I apparently missed
In insulated rocket stoves, no creosote is formed, as the temperatures are so high that any side product such as soot, creosote, smoke etc gets burned in the afterburn process. My guess is that Tim's burn chamber did exactly that as well
@@09conrado Just as important in an rocket stove is that any creosote forming oxides and converted to CO2. The main design point of a rocket stove is really to ensure that there are always enough oxygen to complete the combustion. That's why you can have a roaring fire and hardly any smoke. 🙂
Interesting idea. I could see an issue with the wood liquor fouling the process though.
don't forget to make a siding on the railway for loading the charcoal into a hopper wagon.
Very interesting, though i get the feeling something very similar to this should exist but i don't know very much on the subject
Couple of quick thoughts.
Put your chimney 1/2 to 2/3 of the way down your tube and water/air cool the remainder of the tube for cooling the dry charcoal.
Thermally insulate the shaft between fire box and bearings. Some sort of fiber shaft connector.
Great overall design.
What are you using the charcoal for?
Perhaps the exiting charcoal exiting the first augur could go to a second one was wrapped in a water cooling jacket?
I like your idea. One way you could change it and maybe be a little more efficient without spending so much money, you could have multiple chambers with different heat levels for each one, so they go through stages. Less wear and tear on the first couple of chambers. Another way to be a little more efficient would be to make the tube around the outside out of copper, because copper conducts heat more than steel. I like your idea about the underwater thing. Honestly, back to the copper tubing you could just sheet the tube and copper. It would be a little more efficient. At first the cost would be a little higher, but I believe it will save more energy. Suppose you could find a auger that is long enough to travel throughout the whole process? Like if it took 50 foot to do the whole process? If you had the tube and auger, copper plated and heated it at the end, I believe it would be more efficient and get the results you desire. another thing to consider is having the bearings on a longer shaft at the end in a cooled environment. Much like a spit on the grill. The engine or motor could be on the outside and out of the heat environment. Perhaps a double tube system. The innertube would be plated and copper along with the auger, and the outer tube would be for collecting the gases. The outer to could be clay lined with copper on the inside. Think of a tube and auger long enough to get this accomplished? perhaps the auger itself could have clay tiles attached to it much like the space shuttle, then plated with copper to keep the heat off the auger system. perhaps a way to keep the charcoal from igniting would be to have it vacuum sealed? The way copper expands like much other metals, it could expand to seal, or even have some of the auger be a little bit larger near the end to make a seal so the last bit of the process it would enter into a vacuum, sealed compartment, where there was no chance for it to ignite. maybe the auger would have to be 100 feet or maybe even 200. if you angled the auger at a downward angle, and it was sealed enough, you could have the auger going into a pool when it was finished and then continue on to be dropped into a receptacle at the end after it’s had its bath. The auger could be shorter.
Nice idea. I also had a tried and tested way to produce charcoal which I have used many times. It is simply to have a stove with a straight chimney but with a very large grate. By that I mean the holes in the grate are very large about 10-10cm. All you do is light a fire on the grate and as the wood turns into charcoal it falls through the grate and into the ash pan as charcoal ready for you to scoop it up. There however does need to be a way of regulating the amount of air that enters the fire because otherwise it will burn too quickly whilst alight. From the ash pan it can be funnels via a tube to a bucket of water to cool it down. I have used this method many times and have always had plenty of charcoal. It’s a bit unconventional however is able to produce lots of useful heat and charcoal.
Hope you find this idea useful,
Best regards,
Sam of the Violet Valley Railway.
That's a good idea Sam - do you mean it's a by-product of the woodstove in the house? Or specifically for charcoal making?
@@wayoutwest-workshopstuff6299 it can be used both ways. I made one out of an old gas canister and i use it to keep my garden shed warm in the winter and collect the charcoal allong however in the summer its used just for charcoal.
Best regards, Sam
Maybe cooling a section of the pipe with water is more ideal to spraying the charcoal, as you could re-use the heat somehow. Excited to see the next iteration!
in other videos he showed he uses a spray of water to activate the charcoal, if he uses a spray he can activate it while preventing burning, and he could try and use a turbine to recapture energy from the steam
The auger should have the motor on the cold side infront of the hoper and no bearing on the other side and the auger pipe extended well past the heat source where the outer casing can be cooled with water and having a hinged plate over the end of the auger casing . The charcoal will make a plug at the end of the pipe so no oxygen can enter to burn the the charcoal to ash . The auger should be about 100 mm shorter than the auger casing
One other thing you might want to try is pyrolysis of plastic waste, instead of charcoal you would make petroleum-coke and some crude fractions of oil which may help to further seal the system from outside air. I've always wanted to do something like this, its interesting to think that in the midst of high fuel prices we are virtually surrounded by plastics with the same chemical makeup as petrol. If this sounds interesting to you just make sure that the plastics used are non-halogenated and sulphur free (ie: no PVC, no Nylon, no Teflon, no Rubber), otherwise the combustible gasses made will contain some unhealthy chemicals, but if done right its just as clean as charcoal-making.
You really do not want to do any pyrolysis of plastic in any way, shape or form. CN can easily be formed and combine with water vapor to HCN (hydrocyanic acid gas) and will be very bad.
Better would be to use the waste products as fuel to make the charcoal in a separate chamber. A complete combustion would destroy most toxins.
@@got2kittys You will not get a "complete" combustion where everything is oxidized down to CO2. That why you can get some heat resistant and very nasty end result if you burn plastic. Dioxin and hydrogen cyanide gas is among what you can release.
Thanks for another charming video! Instead of 1 or more conveying tubes, you could have a flat rectangular section tube to maximize heat transfer instead. This wide tube could be propped up at an angle and the contents moved by vibration aided by gravity. Being wide and flat, this tube could carry the flue strapped to its lower surface, with the upper used for carrying the pyro gases back to the fire box.
Yep, good idea. But it needs to exclude the air too..
@@wayoutwest-workshopstuff6299 Some downdraft gasifiers are configured roughly the same way, and they manage to keep the air out by having an air tight lid on the feed hopper, the hopper being part of the same space as the reaction tubes. It's true that the feed hopper needs to be opened when recharging it, but this happens only infrequently and for a short amount of time, and since there is a slight positive pressure in the reaction tubes, one would not expect much air to enter with the hopper lid open.
Good Luck ;)
I got wondering about a longer auger and pipe. One section to cook the charcoal, and a second additional section to cool the charcoal. Of course, that extra length causes more bearing and friction complications
Good video Tim. Thanks.
Will you link the heat generated to the heating system for your house and maybe barn ?
You have, I’m sure already thought about that ages ago.
that's the plan - but I haven't worked out the details yet
Very clever that, needs the auger driven by the stationary engine.