The first paragraph is what l hold on most. I drive low profile, not agresive, clean car, good tires, all the mandatory equipment in the back seat, drive sober… never had problems with police. If l get pulled over, the conversation starts with"licence and registration, plese" and ends with “thank you, have a safe drive” with nothing in between.
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by using a blower and air manifold you can create a curtain kiln. a sheet or curtain of air blowing at a slight angle into the top of a barrel produces charcoal without smoke. see the making charcoal without smoke topic on this forum for this and other smoke free ideas.
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Andrew Heath had posted this in the making charcoal without smoke thread .
To me this idea looks very attractive. It’s a continuous system. Most of the problems with burning wood are the getting up to temperature to achieve a clean burn phase. The other issue magnifying this problem with batch charcoal systems is heating a large mass of wood through to the clean combustion stage.
This approach only burns a small amount of wood volatiles at a time, and is always at clean burn temp.
It will also lend itself very nicely to automation, and could be a great CHP system if rigged to heat a boiler system.
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This is an amazing setup. I want to know a lot more. First of all, does the auger need to be that long at an upward angle? I would think a little auger like Don M. uses would be adequate. I wonder if it has to be filled with charcoal at the bottom so the removal of volatiles remains at the top on the initial run? Maybe the initial run is like a rocket stove pulling air in from the auger hole until the opening is plugged with charcoal?
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The auger length is a good question. I am guessing it is as long as it is because it’s an obtanium build. Also because he wanted enough height to be able to drop char into a pail. But it’s probably also to provide a seal against having a significant air inlet to the bottom, with enough oxygen the char would burn to the bottom.
The concept looks scalable, I believe it could be made a lot smaller using smaller biomass, straw or wood chips.
If the combustion was enclosed in a refractory lining, the burn would be more complete. A chimney would create quite a lot of draw / draft, allowing the burner to be throttled over a range with a damper.
Forced air induction could also be used if necessary, primary and secondary air could be separately regulated / tuned.
This rice husk gasifier is interesting, I don’t know what the internal design is, but he seems to have no issue with char burning to the bottom. However, rice char will be like a plug, charcoal might not behave the same at all.
Finding video…
Couldn’t find the video, but here’s one using the same concept. This one has a shorter combustion chamber, and a gate to open and close, that could be applicable.
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The auger also turns a lot of the charcoal into usable size for a gasifier compared to the feedstock size.
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This is something we need a detailed drawing of, inner workings.
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I think it’s fairly straight forward, looks like a hot water tank inner chamber, a barrel or some kind of tank for the air jacket. The auger will go to the center of the bottom, maybe 4’ long. The only question I have is primary air, I’m not sure if there is any, but the design would likely benefit from a ring of nozzles inside the combustion chamber about a third of the way down.
It’s a top fueled TLUD.
Charcoal is pretty amazing, deprived of oxygen it goes dead once below combustion temps, which appears to be the purpose of the cooling jacket, and then the transfer through the auger.
And yes, the auger appears to be doing a very nice grinding job.
And as was mentioned in the other discussion thread, it would have to be primed with charcoal, either an auxiliary air inlet, which I believe is what you see capped down by the auger, to build up a mass as in a cone kiln, or just throw in charcoal to the 2/3 level, then build a fire on top of that.
I think a member should throw one together… 
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I am a little stuck on sourcing a small diameter auger, I have nothing handy in my obtanium pile. A combine wrecker seems like a possibility, but it would be very antique equipment.
Building an auger wouldn’t be so bad, if there’s access to 18 or 16ga steel, just a matter of developing a pattern in heavy paper to establish the hole and outside diameter, and get fabricating the flights.
Here is some more information and pictures of the continuous charcoal retort.
I really like this idea.
This could be a very promising improvement.
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Hi Connor H, back on the Topic. When Diving Through The City, which is more of a town for me. Some of things is stop and going and waiting at a traffic light. The last thing I want to do is stall the engine on take off.
So what I did when I first started to learn to drive my gasifier truck, is practice taking off over and over again. I found a unused road and would sit there as if at a light. I remember still the first few times, doing it for real in traffic at a light, I was nervous, now no biggie. Becoming very familiar with the gasifier vehicle before heading into the city or town is good insurance.
One other thing is maintenance, burning out your throttle plate and intake. If it fires up while driving in town or in the city you will have what we call, (an event.) Lots of smoke out the tail pipe. You don’t want that when driving in lots of traffic. I haven’t had an event and I’m hoping I never will. If I do my maintenance it should never happen. Fun things to know about running a gasifier vehicle. It’s fun and I still SWEM (smile with every mile), when passing the gas station.
Bob
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taitgarry00.
Extrapolating beyond Joel’s couple of days to make a continuous feed backyard biochar maker that works for him, on into what was done before, which works well for Paul Wever, using additional physical plant - the chipenergy biomass furnace ;~)
http://chipenergy.com/furnace.php
Different strokes for different folks ;~) All good.