[Bioconversion] News Paper Fireball

[Les Blevins]

Jeff,

I have had experience working in an old fashioned paper mill here in 
Lawrence Kansas. This mill was at that time the oldest paper mill west of 
the Mississippi River. It was powered mainly by three Monarch 250 
horse-power steam engines and various electric motors up to about 250 
horse-power. This mill was shut down, dismantled and scrapped out sometime 
in the 1960s or 70s as I recall. It was quite an experience working there 
when I was a young man.

Anyway his paper mill was used to make a brown paper that was used in the 
making of corrugated box board. At different times this paper mill used such 
diverse feedstocks as wheat straw, corrugated boxes and many other waste 
paper forms including newsprint. When I worked there in the early 1960s it 
used only waste paper as the primary ingredient in the making of new paper.

The scrap paper was dumped in big rotating cookers called "rotaries" where 
it was soaked in water and the rotary was capped and rotated for hours on 
end while the contents were put under low steam pressure. After soaking and 
"cooking" for about 24 hours it was dumped out and augured into "beaters" 
where it was circulated around and around and beat to a "pulped" condition 
to get it ready to be made into paper once again. Recycling ain't anything 
new, I can attest to that.

Anyway I remember you could stick your hand into the warm paper pulp and 
water in the beaters and pull out a handful of pulp and make a ball out of 
it like making a snowball and by pressing it tight in your hands squeeze 
some but not all of the water out. The balls of wet paper pulp when dried 
out would stick together very well but could also be easily pulled apart if 
one wanted to.

I think these paper-pulp "snowballs" would be easy to make today; if one had 
the proper pulping equipment and a steady supply of scrap paper, straws, 
husks or other fibrous materials like switchgrass, wood shavings or sawdust 
and it wouldn't be difficult to dry them into a commercial fuel that could 
be used in heaters and boilers that could be either manually or 
automatically stoked with Bio-Balls and a wide variety of other fuel forms 
such as pellets, cubes, or briquettes made of similar materials.

My own patented furnace design ( see www.aaecorp.com/ceo.html ) can use any 
of these fuel forms and others in either manual or automatic mode to heat 
water, spaces or processes such as the drying of "Bio-Ball" fuels or grain.

My BlackJack furnace employs automatic pivoting grates and it is also 
designed to pyrolyze or gasify various solid fuels to produce carbon based 
fuels and synthetic gases (syngas) for use as clean renewable fuel in 
various heaters, boilers, internal combustion engines, combustion turbines 
and in various other ways.

Les Blevins
AAEC







----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Davis" <jeff0124 at velocity.net>
To: <bioconversion at listserv.repp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 9:52 PM
Subject: [Bioconversion] News Paper Fireball


Dear List,

Today I have made my first news paper fireballs in a cement mixer with 
paddles removed. They also had some ground up switchgrass and sawdust mixed 
with the paper. The paper was first wetted then ran through a desposal. The 
fireballs are not dry yet, so only time will tell if they stick together.

I want to skip the depsosal (grinding) process. Right now I am soaking a 55 
gallon drum of paper in water. I hope that in time the paper will be reduced 
enough to feed straight in to the mixer.

So one can make fireballs from paper!



Jeff Davis
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