[Stoves] Energy from whole coconuts

[Crispin at newdawn.sz]

Dear Ian

Interesting prospect.  I presume you have heard about the guy making
'diesel' from the 'waste' coconuts, somewhere on an island not that far from
you.

Something to watch for is to try to get rid of the water in the coconut
before trying to cook with them.  In principle you have wet woody biomass
and the first instruction would be to dry your fuel before using it.

When you are not trying to get the oil out you are a lot freer to have mould
appear on it.  My suspicion is that you are going to have more trouble
getting the moisture out of the nut that it is worth as biomass.  I think
most of the heat in is the shell and husk with the oil being useful only if
you dry it first.

If it is worth making a hole to drain the coconut milk, is it not worth
chopping it in half to dry it faster?  The oil won't evaporate or anything.
Then the nut dries it shrinks, lets go and drops out even if there is quite
a bit of moisture still in it.

As the husk is really bulky with a low density I guess the stove that would
use it easily would be large, i.e. institutional cooking might be the
easiest place to start.

Regards from
Crispin



___________________________________________________________
$0 Web Hosting with up to 200MB web space, 1000 MB Transfer
10 Personalized POP and Web E-mail Accounts, and much more.
Signup at www.doteasy.com