[Gasification] Self-drying Wood Chips

[andrew]

On Sunday 10 December 2006 11:49, Paul S. Anderson wrote:

>
> Can you provide more info on this drier, please?  What size of
> wood was being dried?  Woodchips?  And point our how you think it
> could be improved.  

Not much to say really, it is based on a standard shipping container 
and takes an 18 tonne load. Originally this was stacks of sawn 
timber but nowadays he loads crates of cut and split logs. He has 
recently made enquiries about optimising it for economy (we 
originally intended to supply an economiser section which would half 
his fuel use but he declined on grounds of capital cost) and using 
waste wood as the fuel. Think of it as a large fan oven set to 120C.

Its specific performance is about 5MJ per kg of water removed, this 
is pretty poor when you consider burning the wet wood directly would 
only lose 2.7MJ per kg of water in the wood. Implemented as 
originally specified it should have dropped below 2MJ/kg using 
techniques Tom reported.

AJH