GEK Wiki / Softwood Chip Run
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Softwood Chip Run

Page history last edited by Answer Blip 13 years, 11 months ago

Run: Softwood Chips 091809 

The purpose of this experiment was to compare two solvents for tar testing, test for tars at varied pressure drops across the reactior, characterize the filter media, and to test the performance of the spiral stir bar.

  • Biomass: chipped up pine chips (pine and doug fir)

     Amount of fuel used for entire run: two and 1/3 five gallon buckets,

     moisture content: 13.9% dry weight

     bulk density: 195 kg/m^3

     void space: 53%

 

  • Charcoal: The charcoal that was used to start the run came from the filter from the instrumented GEK with about 8-10 hours of run time. The charcoal looks like bituminous coal, and when torched, shows a yellow flame as the tars are oxidized, different than that plain charcoal which just glows when torched. Adding the spent charcoal filter media back into the reactor is a great solution for disposal/recovery. The ash port was not emptied so it was fairly full on start up with a total of 10 hours of runtime build-up. There was some discussion on how the filled ash port with granular charcoal could cause the reduction bell to run at hotter temperatures. One theory could be that the packed char heats up and may lengthen the reduction zone which could then lengthen the residence time in the region.

     The reactor was started with a pressure drop across the reactor of 3 in of H2O for 30 minutes before any tar samples were taken. It took 5 minutes for the wood gas to sustain a flare from the begining of start up.

 

The tar samples were taken by entering a q-tip into the gas stream for five minutes before and after the filter housing. The filter housing was the earlier version, the newer version of the filter is bigger than the one used in this experiment.

 

 

The new spiral stir bar was set to spin upwards, this is the same design as the auger.  It stopped 1 inch from the nozzles, The new motor was used which has twice as more torque than the previous motor that we have been using. The auger-style stir bar carved a corridor with wood chips instead of mixing the reactor. The auger style stir bar did not work for wood chips, but it could possibly work with other types of biomass and could still be considered for smaller particle sizes of fuel that could fit in between the pitch of the turns.

 

#
solvent t_red temp

b_red

temp

reactor pressure location
1 Isopropyl 715 609 2.5 before filter
1 Mineral spirits 755 612 2 before filter
2 Isopropyl 715 609 2.5 after filter
2 Mineral spirits 755 612 2 after filter
3 Isopropyl 757 647 4.25 before filter
3 Mineral spirits 753 669 4.5 before filter
4 Isopropyl 757 647 4.25 after filter
4 Mineral spirits 753 669 4.5 after filter
5 Isopropyl 766 719 5.5 before filter
5 Mineral spirits 793 725 6 before filter
6 Isopropyl 766 719 5.5

after

filter

6 Mineral spirits 793 725 6 after filter

 

There is a significant drop in tar in the gas stream after the filter. It is hard to tell in the picture, but the mineral spirits seemed to pick up a greener tent of tar than the isopropyl alcohol, but the isopropyl seemed to be more saturated in color than the mineral spirits. Yet there is a more of a difference in color of the mineral spirits between the reactor pressure of 2 in of H2O than the higher flow rates.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.