Vulcan Gasifier

Both, we have over a foot of snow here. I hate snow, and I hate the cold :). Yeah your prolly right, when I would go to Corpus Christi it was pretty difficult to deal with in January. I have no idea how people could live there year around. Ive never experience humidity like that. Michigan especially where Im at is very humid from the lake.

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The sunset silhouettes are striking, nice shot.
Pepe

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OK, I just received part of the order from Missouri Wind and Solar. So far Ive only cut the boxes open for a looksy inside. i will do the unboxing over the weekend and will take some pics of the stuff. We have a lot more of the order on the way yet, So Im not sure if I will be able to assemble anything yet, but you can bet I will be trying.

I will be submitting the work orders for our side of the build tomorrow. I will be designing a revised auger hopper for this guy next week. Im planning this so it will straddle the Predator Generator.

Soon after this build new development will begin. This next development is going to be focused on combining some of the advanced processes we developed on the big V8 machine with new concepts that we did proof of concept. This will be combining our HGRS systems in with a newly designed secondary reactor system. This will perform a hopper gas to steam reforming process and this will also control temperatures in the secondary reactor and keep it check. This will all be bolt on systems for the existing Flex R1. We recently inherited a build that just did not meet my quality standards and I just cant let it go out the door with these flaws. So it will be our demo, test mule. Good news is I put together a really good team, in the last few months. My issues with some help that were not holding our quality to standard are no longer. My new assembler, is a little slow, but he is treating the machines like a piece of art and that is what Im looking for.

Anyways pics soon on that wind mill, the quality of the stuff they have shipped looks excellent!!!

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Here is one of the latest machines we have built. This is our Flex R1 5K turnkey, this is the replacement machine. This one stands up straight like its supposed to and isnt leaking out of every orifice lol.

So had a good run on it today, reduction still not fully built up yet and our fuel is a bit wet. So have fuel drying over the weekend and we will do an updated video this Monday.

Not a whole lot has changed for the first revision of the Flex. We have fine tuned some of the sheet metal to fit together better and we came out with a better manifold for the Predator. It has a better flow design for mixing the air/fuel mixture and is simpler in design.

This machine is going to one of our own here DOW as well. This will be delivered to Jason McBride one our members down in sunny Texas.

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Looking real good Matt! Thanks again for being honest with the build quality of the last one, and having the integrity to do right by me. I’m looking forward to taking delivery of my new backup system!

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Ok I just wrapped the first part of Jason’s order, he has a micro in process. But the Flex R1 5K will be ready to ship in the next few days as we begin packaging it.

So even after five years of tinkering with these machines I learn new theory or new pieces of knowledge everytime I run one of these machines. On this machine we started out with a wet fuel, ran wood pellets with it to boost it while we built up the char bed. Then had a few issues with fuses popping and going undetected resulting in grate clogging leading to reduction crashing, then leading to tar build ups in the char bed.

When a gasifier is running good, all is good!! However, when problems manifest almost always there will be other issues to accompany the source cause of the issue and then depending on how long the issue has gone undetected and nature of the issue many things can be effected all the way to the engine. So reversing and correcting issues not always happen right away and sometime you just have to give the machine some time to get back to operating as usual.

So with this particular situation I corrected this issue when I dried my fuel and then repairing the fuse issue, however, I did not see the results of this for a long time. It took many hoppers and many hours to get the char bed back to flowing correctly.

This stuff just kicks ur butt at times, and you want to start changing everything, but you must have patience; especially if you know your machine has ran good before. Don’t change anything and always fix the obvious. Wet fuel and a blown fuse were the obvious issues I had. So I now just had to wait for the machine to correct itself once these issues were fixed.

So anyways we had a very successful run today everything ran to par and it will only get better from here. The machines can take from 20 hoppers or even more to fully burn in and seal them selfs. We perform a vacuum test on all machines and to pass they must hit 30" of water or better with our test set up. We use a small shop vac that is dedicated for this test.

So late today I did an update video with the wind turbine system and the AIMs Power Inverter. All are impressive and I can not wait to tie that AIMs into one of the Predators. On the AIMs website this things looks small, not the case they are huge!!! These have a lot of cool features and one will be apart of next gen electronics enabling self initiated start up sequences. When the batteries need charging the AIMs inverter will send out a signal, we will use this to initiate self ignition inside the gasifier all the way to engine start.

Video of this will be here once the pigeons arive over to YouTube on the west coast :fire:

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Video has finally uploaded

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Good morning Matt.

Very good description of the other 75% :blush:

Thanks for the video , very well done .

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My UK distributor made this video, of the big picture of future generation community based grid systems.

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Well we have orders on the way and gaining more interest in the big V8 machine. So in preparation of the new orders for this thing I did the 2016 revisions. I basically did a complete redesign. It got a scaled up version of the Flex but with liquid cooling systems and an added centrifugal filter system is series. This should do a good job at performing final gas cooling and drying out the gas. The last stop is a new air fuel mixer canister that is separate from the engine and this has our blower integrated into it as well. I kept the machine in the same foot print as before with 4 X 5 steel pallet. The enclosure now fully conceals the machine so all hot parts are out of reach. There will be doors to access the manual controls and clean out systems. However, this will be a full auto machine I have the code worked out it will all be ran by the push of a button.

The Auger Hopper is up from 18 cubic feet to 26 cubic feet not including whats in the primary hopper. It will be something like 28 cubic feet fully loaded. The chiller radiator will be twice the size of prior revisions, with a higher flow pump. The media filter is now our condenser; however there is a removable basket for installing media into it. However, the more space inside this the more effective it will be at condensing. I dont use media in our machines, but it can be added if desired.

Ok going to sleep now enjoy :fire:

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A series of small cyclones? interesting.

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HI Matt,
Are you using muffler flex tube on these, or something else? I heard that the flex exhaust tubes leak.

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NICE! One of my favorite things about you Matt, always thinking how to do it better!

Hi Brit, no we use all steel tubing. For Flexible hose there is a high temp flexible hose you can get.

there are others available as well. Do not use the steal flexible exhaust hose it dont work this.

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Well Im trying to throw the works at so we can be done with the core design of the machines. Not that development will be done, but to give us a foundation we can easily add onto to add new development technologies.

I think we are there!!

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Yeah pretty cool huh. I had to flip the whole thing around so could have that space above the generator head. In the larger picture; later development I am planning on a regenerative micron filtration system that would go here. This may come as an option to the cyclones. The cyclones should add something where as before there was no more filtering system. So I am expecting to see some improvement here specifically in gas drying. :fire:

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Keep me posted as you test it… very cool

A trick I learned at work watching the operator at the sand plant.
His goal is to catch a certain grain size of sand for blending in to fill.
Too much fines and the sand won’t drain.
Too large a cyclone will not catch the desired product.

At the School of mines up your way they have a mill in the basement and the ground control mechanics .
They teach cyclone and particle size ect…

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Yup, I reduced our cyclone size on the larger machines, not enough velocity. Because this machine is so compact the gas does not get to travel very far to cool and filter. The cyclones on this are the same as our Flex R-1 so at this velocity they should work very well. If anything they will be very effective at cooling. Even if they do not drop moisture it will drop later in our mixer canister and that would actually be more desireable.

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Thanks Matt! The link as very helpful. McMaster has all the good stuff. I keep forgetting how much stuff they have.

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