Hello everybody, thanks for the useful info. I am starting to get a picture in my head of what I would like to build. I will make some sketches when I get some free time - the grape harvest is not far off, so I am going to get pretty busy here for a while. I did pick up a steel ammo can (50 cal square box with gasket) that I am thinking of using as a filter. A quick search of the forum made it clear that I was not the first one to think of it. I will poke around and see if i can figure out what has been tried. I was thinking of maybe brazing/welding a cyclone filter to the bottom of it, though, and then plumbing the cyclone straight to the top of the reactor with a thin walled steel tube. I am going to have to go down to the steel yard and look for a section of 5" pipe for the hearth section of my reactor.
Koen: I was thinking about this design you posted:
Instead of wrapping the hearth section in pipe, what about wrapping it in a slightly larger sleeve? You would leave enough of a gap so that the cross section (seen from above) between the hearth pipe and the sleeve was about the same area as your nozzle. The sleeve would be sealed at the bottom, so your draft air would have to be sucked down along the hot sides - preheating your reaction air and also cooling your reactor vessel. You could plumb in a port for EGR in the bottom, but I do see that adding water might be hard to implement. What do you think of that idea? For maximum efficiency is adding steam a must?
Thanks guys, I will be in touch again as soon I can!