Generating electricity from wood waste

[magicmikey]

Rather than composting I suspect the fuel is being aged, the change to the wood makes it flow better through the stoker equipment whereas fresh will tend to bridge or hang up.
mike

[Al_Smith]

You know to tell the truth I have no idea how they feed the fire .I wouldn't think it would be augered like a stocker fed house furnace using coal .Lawdy if that thing clogged it would pack saw dust tighter than a bulls butt at flytime .

I doubt they fling it like on a rotary grate  coal boiler .I'd about guess it would be blown in like they transport sawmill dust or grain in a processing plant . Really don't know though . ???

[magicmikey]

 The ideas for feeding a boiler are as varied as designing a bandmill,  :)including augers. Wood waste is about the toughest material to move without blockages. The feed system must also respond to varying loads and includes fuel variences - moisture, fines,chunks and composition.
  A common operation uses chutes with an air nozzle at the bottom to spread the fuel over the grate same as a coal stoker. You get a 2 part fire, fines burn in suspension with the chunks forming a bed on the grate. Probably the best feeder for hog fuel can be found by googling " moving hole feeder".
mike

[Al_Smith]

Aha,thanks for that .That moving hole feeder deal is very similar to a system used at a local (30 miles away ) company that uses wood flour and phenolic based resins to make a product .

That "wood flour " is chips ground as fine as face powder and once mixed  with the resin is sticky as hide glue ,nasty,nasty ,nasty .

[pyrocasto]

Somehow I've missed this thread.

I've been into DIY alternative energy since I was in high school. www.fieldlines.com is a great place to start, and I've been a member for around 7 years there.

Replacing electric/gas bills with alternative methods is easy. You simply have to decide whether you want to pay a different bill for 20 years until the new stuff is paid off, or if you'd rather spend a bunch of time fiddling and save some money. Gasification is a good example. Pay $20k for a 20kw system you can run tomorrow, or build one yourself for hundreds that may take you a year work right.

My opinion is to just buy solar with or without a battery system, or build a home made windmill system if you have the time/space. Pay off on the solar is around 15 years now, and they will last 30-40, and payoff with decent wind on a homemade can be a few years or so. Steam could be a good option, but steam engines arent cheap if you arent building them, and permitting can be difficult.

If you lived in northern canada you might check out peltier/thermoelectric chips as an option, but they arent very efficient.

[Al_Smith]

Well there have been many alternatives over the years of ways to conserve energy with respect to residential construction .Earth sheltered houses were one .Although very practical they fell out of favor .Seems after a period of time people felt they lived in a basement of which for all intents they did .

That aside even industrial buildings are being more conservative about ways to conserve which has nothing to do with being "green" merely a buzz word ,nothing more .The real reason is dollars and cents savings .

Another savings regarding electrical usage would be more energy efficient drive systems used on large industrial applications for machine tools and the like . The large 50 to 200HP drive motors have pretty much been replaced with DC servo motors which operate considerabley more economicaly than the previous systems .In addition the lighting systems are now using much better illumination than the thousands of 8 foot flourescent lights of years ago .

All this has nothing to do with generating electrical power from wood chips though ,only a thought .The difference between a 2 million square foot factory and a sawmill is quite light years apart

[pyrocasto]

I agree Al, you save a lot more money by spending for more efficient appliances, building materials and the such, than you do buying alternative energy stuff. I have a 35k sq ft cabinet shop with a ~$22000 a year electric bill, with another $8000 yearly for NG heating(fire marshal is an idiot, wont allow wood boilers). I'm currently insulating the garage doors with cardboard as inch per inch it's almost as good as foam boards. Cheap, effective.

[SwampDonkey]

Insulation will do wonders. ;D

My electric bill is so cheap that I'd have to live a long time to recover costs from any of the solar and wind, plus loose on replacement parts and maintenance. You gotta do the math and put down the glossy brochures. I was sitting and talking to a neighbor from my area a couple weeks ago. He moved to another town and was in to see father and a guy back east visiting us. He said he put in a $6000 windmill, a local build. But then he said it's only supplemental. He said the power company only pays about 1.5 cents a killowatt for the surplus times. He also went on to say it had already blown apart one time in the wind and he had to repair the roof from the collision. All confirmed what I knew all a long that you will encounter.  The hitting the roof might be a freak thing, but the breaking down of equipment is going to happen. ;)

[Kansas]

Still working on it. Waiting on the KFS for the engineer advice. But I did stumble onto something. Bloom Energy, which has fuel cell technology, has a website and they talked about what can power their stand alone fuel cell units. One of the things mentioned was biogas. They were referring more to the gasses off of landfills and waste plants that cities have. Wonder if there is a chance in the world wood burning gases would power one of these units. Here is their website.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/

Most of them are powered by natural gas. But if you hit products and data sheet, it mentions biogas.

[jpgreen]

Call these guys.  They need a new project, since California burned them.

http://www.globalgreensolutionsinc.com/s/Home.asp