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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Here is the the Autofeed hopper add on system for the Flex R1. This will fit all existing 2015 M-IV models as well. The stock hopper will just need replacement with an updated version.
This hopper should extent run times out to 12 hours @ 5 kW output. The Flex R1 stock hopper is 1.5 CF this hopper increase this capacity out to 26 CF.
We will begin building the very first one next week
Wood chips like the Wayne Kieth gasifier. Matt has adjustable nozzles so you can tune it for different fuels. He has a reduction plate for the micro so it can run pellets. I don’t think the flex needs the reduction plate for pellets, Matt?
