I did an experiment some time ago using a refractory lined swirl burner and wood chunks. The refractory glows once the process is under way, so there’s auto ignition. From that I can envision a smaller diameter burner as described, the sparks would really fly if using light chopped straw…
I just haven’t found the time to build the unit envisioned.
As for employing the appropriate material for the job, in many areas I think that means straw, usually available right outside city / town limits, and already harvested. For sure it has technical challenges, but working systems have been demonstrated for 100 years.
Garry, go for it. Especially if you have a large source. A tall flame sometimes means there is a lack of oxygen. Yes people have burned straw for a 100 years or more however they did not need to meet EPA rules. That killed a lot of square bail burners. There are some nice round bale burners but not cheap. There are also boiler issues with the alkaline or acid. Takes a lot of equipment to harvest and bale where wood can just use a chain saw. However you could just buy the bales and dispense with the need for equipment. You will need to be very devoted to chopped straw to make it successful.
I’m sure that flare was over fueled and overblown, but it sure put out the BTU’s…
I was R&D-ing for a foundry, but quite entertained with the results. If that sort of burner was contained in a larger vessel with secondary air, I expect emissions would be low. And it will be scalable over a huge range. The air draft should sweep the combustion area clean.
If corrosion is an issue, then stainless is the material, same as for insulated chimney flue.
Straw can be pretty simply processed, as simply as the antique straw choppers, or the chaff produced by modern combine straw choppers.
The other thing is that the equipment needed for the straw, though complex, is a basic necessity for our civilization’s food, so it’s a readily available resource.
A lot easier use for straw is to build a large pile of chopped straw with a stack in the middle. Don’t be concerned with it getting wet. It will start to compost and dry out the center, The outside layer will be wet and that is what you want to help control the amount of combustion. Wait until it is snow covered and lite if off through the stack. You will end up with a lot of charcoal and some uncooked straw to spread on the soil. This was based on the Roger Sampson rice husk carbonizer method, just scaled up. I never had the time to use snow blanket but if there would have been time it would have been next.
To fuel your near by city go the digester method. Mr. Pain used it with wood chips and I tried it with chopped switch grass. The trick seems to be to pre-compost it a bit. Not practical in small scale for cold climate but at large scale I think it would work. You will also be left with nice muck to add to the soil. At this scale you might need to scrape up a large amount of money to make it work. I think in warm climates the small scale unit, for cooking and etc., would work.
In regards to charcoal added to the soil I see no harm. It depends on the soil, how the charcoal is made and what it is made of. I think of my experience as worst case and that is good for this method, no harm. Others, with different soil and charcoal, see positive results.
I want to add a word of caution about fire-powered machinery in fields… It sort of fits the topic.
Last Sunday I helped put out a massive brush fire on our neighbor’s place. They had had a bonfire the night before, and thought it had gone out. The bonfire area was nearby some standing dead trees, and surrounded on three sides by around 100 acres of unharvested but dry soybeans. The wind picked up (straight towards our house) and before you know it, the fire was back, spreading through the grass. The dead trees caught too, burning like chimneys, the grass fire quickly moved out into the field, it was within 5 feet of getting into the beans when we got it licked. If it had gotten there, it would have been nearly impossible to put out with our rural volunteer FD trucks (3 came to the scene). The fire would have quickly spread to the edges of the field, gone into the woods, and endangered our farm as well.
I’m all for wood powered tractors, in most cases. But let’s all please be careful not to set the farm on fire. All it takes is a spark in dry grass (or beans) on a windy day.
There are days when the cost of diesel might be worth the safety factor.
I have seen diesel machines catch fire also. Stuff collects on the exhaust manifold and can lite off. And then there are electrical and grease fires. Three miles from me is a newish 4WD tractor burned to a crisp on a farmers field.
Hey Y’all,
Chris brings up a good point. FIRE DANGER!!! Now imagine what it might be like to live in Colorado, the american west or just about anywhere in the US west of the 100th meridian (the north-south part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma). Forest fires, grass fires, just wild fires of all kinds have been part of nature here for a very long time. But now we have a lot of people living here. And we’re not Indians. We DON’T set the prairies on fire so the buffalo will like the very green grass that grows afterward. What are we GOING to do? Ans. We’re going to control burns and take other fire control measures, that aren’t very effective. Yes, we have a LOT of fire related disasters. I think we NEED something like this carbon negative combine harvester. Cripes, last summer we had smoke here in Denver that had come all the way from Oregon. Now that was a fire.
Just saying, ya know.
Rindert
We’ve had smoke here, stuff you can smell, not just see, from the Canadian and northern US Rockies, and the Yukon. It’s been a yearly thing now for a while, times are changing…
It is amazing how fast a fire can spread. I can remember a prairie grass fire that I barely got out of the way of that was moving at the speed of the wind. Way faster than I could run. A combine with a hot gasifier scares the hell out of me . A combine running on diesel in dry conditions worries me. Just me saying.
I nearly burned up my charcoal-powered Toyota Corolla before I even got it on the road. I was using a straight pipe nipple as a nozzle then. While I was in the car trying to get the engine to start and keep running. A piece of charcoal flew out the air inlet into dry grass. By the time i noticed what was going on, the fire was burning underneath the car and toward the neighbor’s yard. in the moments of panic which followed, I envisioned the car going up in flames and perhaps the burning of surrounding structures. I ran, got a fire extinguisher and managed to put the fire out before it did more than minor damage. I was scared to death there for a few moments.
Hi Garry,
I live 3 miles below the Canadian border in the northeast
corner of Clinton county, NY. We have smelled the smoke
from Canadian wild fires and it sure does wake you up when you’re
surrounded by forest and fields of ripe grains!!!
Pepe
Agreed. When we started getting heavy smoke from the Rockies a few years ago I thought that was pretty significant. But over the last 2 years on occasion you can smell it, like someone was burning a brush pile a few miles away. When that’s from a fire 1500 or 2000 km away, you know something fundamental has changed. Last year was a huge burn year in the Rockies, the smoke plume was visible from satellite images over Greenland and northern Europe.
I don’t think we can have that kind of events and not expect global consequences.
As for the fields, it’s amazing there aren’t more fires, given how cigarette butts get tossed, sparks shedding off quad mufflers, etc.
This should be “off topic”, but here is a link. https://www.wsj.com/video/the-big-questions-around-aramcos-mega-ipo/70BFEC61-9B2B-4DE9-8CEA-8927F2225910.html …That didn’t work… right click, then “open in new tab” works.
My personal opinion for any “portable/ mobile” equipment is this: Use gasification to run electrical generation. Charge batteries (energy density getting better daily). Batteries power the equipment. Cars, Ag equip, ships, trains… probably NOT aircraft for the near future! Hard to beat the advantages of Diesel-electric systems, though. (Nuclear is best).
Yeah, it will be a unique oil company offering, with no independent accounting whatever of their “proved and probable” reserves, or how much sea water they’ve been pumping. Seems to really fly in the face of the USGS projections anyways. I think world peak production is already past us, but this will only become undeniable once we can look back, same as when US production peaked in 1973.
For shipping, the most available energy source is wind. There have been modern technology trials using wind power to greatly reduce fuel consumption.
It’s unfortunate that we aren’t able to organize as a society to make best use of our resources, there’s a giant gap between where we are and where we could be.
I agree, nuclear is one of our best options, ready for immediate rollout. Especially if you look into the work being done in France and India on rebreeder reactors and especially thorium. Wikipedia has an excellent article. CANDO had done a lot of excellent development work on intrinsically safe stand alone district heating and power generators, all ready for immediate rollout, if anyone would just sign the papers. Near zero emissions, I’d say get er done…
Lightening often starts fires here in Colorado. I don’t have any statistics but they can start in hundreds of different ways. When it gets really dry up here you just KNOW something is going to happen. And you kind of hope that it will happen sooner rather than later, because the more time passes the more plant material accumulates and the worse the fire will be eventually.
Rindert
TomC