A few of you have asked what I am using wood chips for. There is some metal content here, so I guess its okay:
We are just getting into wood gasification to produce motor fuel. We will run an electric generator to feed power back into the grid, using the grid as our "storage battery". Hopefully, we will scavange the excess heat from the process, too. We are thinking 25Kwhr/hr to
50Kwhr/hr for one 10 hour day per week.Using wood chips as fuel will allow us to auger the solid fuel into the gasifier as needed, under electronic control, we hope.
Currently we have a small Chinese gasifier setup known as the "JXQ10A" and are using it to "get our feet wet". Early next month we'll hook it up to a 16hp Onan genset to see what it can do.
Eventually we will be using about 1000 pounds of wood chips per day, one day a week to generate (hopeefully) all the electricity we need.
My son recently bought a used Woodchuck wood chipper that had a 300 cu.inch Ford engine. We have to replace it and get it running. In the meantime, we have been salvaging wood chips from the roadside. We only need 500 hundred pounds or so for this level of testing. There are sawmills in the area who sell woodchips, but they are generally too big and contain too much bark for our application. Bark= ash.
As you can see, we are quickly learning that there are many different quality levels of wood chips, for our application, at least. "Bridging" in the gasifier is a major issue, so we need a constant size chip and no long and/or stringy stuff. Hnadling, drying, sifting and classifying are the preparation issues we are dealing with right now. I am trying to keep good data on all this, so, as we scale up the data will be useful for a smooth transition.
This project will require a lot of fabrication of metals, at all levels.
See what's happening to date at our house at:
Pete Stanaitis
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