Agricultural Residues

tractor jack briquette press

21 November 2011 - 8:57am

Robert

Fairchild

I was finally able to complete my tractor jack briquette press on a recent trip to Haiti. I started it in the spring, but had to load it into a shipping container in May before I could complete and test it. It uses a 3 1/2 ton (3.2 tonne) 48" (122cm) tractor jack. About 30" (76cm) pressing cylinder, 3" (76mm) diameter PVC . Two 3/4" (19mm) threaded rods for tensile members. 4' x 6" (10cm x 15cm) rectangular steel tubing base. Shouldered hole in bottom to hold cylinder base while allowing briquette ejection. 4" x 4" (10cm x 10cm) square steel tubing top. Wood frame. Removable steel plate covers ejection hole for pressing. The machine tips to horizontal for briquette ejection.
The long stroke allows for production of multiple briquettes at once with plastic disc spacers.
The current design produces pucks. Holey briquettes are possible with some modifications. We hand tore the paper and only soaked it briefly. The briquettes were quite dense and held together well.Nike Air Max 200

Haiti

Metal

paper waste

Agricultural Residues

Paper

Envirofit uses Accessories to Improve Fuel Efficiency

21 July 2011 - 5:09pm

Daniel Wald July, 2011

Envirofit's G-3300 Wood Stove

G-3300 Stove with Flexible Pot Skirt

This is a pretty straight-forward, efficient wood cooking stove, with a rest in the front for loading stick wood. It's pretty nice looking, and they've worked with Oak Ridge Natl. Labs to create a durable combustion area.

It's got a couple of neat accessories. The one on the picture above is a flexible pot skirt. Pot skirts do a wonderful job of increasing heating efficiency, but they can be hard to implement because not all cooking pots are the same size. This solves that problem simply, and it looks nice which as we know from user feedback is critical to stove success.

They have a chimney attachment which adds another "burner" to the stove, and helps vent smoke more efficiently.

Spec sheets and manuals are on their web site:
http://www.envirofit.org/cookstoves/g-3300.html

Envirofit's CH-4400 Charcoal Stove

Envirofit Charcoal Stove with Cooking Pot

Apparently this is all the charcoal cooking stove. It is designed to be one of the cleanest burning stoves available. At first, I mistook the tall top part to be a cooking pot, but instead it is part of the stove. According to the instructions, the user needs a combination of charcoal and wood sticks or chips, that are loaded into the bottom of the stove, then the upper part with the pot skirt allows the stove to burn more efficiently. There are attachments for the other version of this charcoal stove that allow for grilling. This one seems more optimized for pots.

Additional information on the Charcoal stove:
http://www.envirofit.org/cookstoves/ch-4400.html

Agricultural Residues

Testing Results of the Estufa Finca and Report

2 December 2010 - 12:00am

From Art's Preface:
Buenas,
Just a quick note from Costa Rica. Our Estufa Finca (a large TLUD) team is two weeks into preparing for a 10 week pilot project. Working with SALTRA and a program at the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, we will be installing 50 , locally produced stoves with migrant coffee bean pickers.

I want to side with Paal on this very important point. Our stoves can have the best looking numbers in the lab. But if people won't use them it doesn't make much difference does it. The stove design we are using has been jointly developed by myself, my Central American partners (esp. the women who are building them APORTES), but most esp. by listening very carefully to the people who we hope to benefit. Much of the feed back has been in regard to the fuels issue. These people do not have access to chips or pellets, we are not going to get them to make briquttes, etc... so instead we have given them a fuel chamber easy to load with sticks, sugar cane bagasse, etc. and powerful enough to cook for the typically large extended families. This process stared in August 2009, there are currently 20 of our stoves being used in CR and Nicaragua, the feedback has been very positive. The pilot project is simply a continuation of that process. We are going to be using the KPT version 3.0 protocol, with some customization to monitor 30 stoves. All of us on the team are looking forward to adding more TLUD based stoves to our line. But this approach is showing us what will get used in the real world.

File attachments:

estufa_finca_report.pdf

Agricultural Residues

MY HOME GOOD STOVE

27 October 2010 - 4:01am

Sai Bhaskar Reddy

From My Home Good Stove

From

"My Home Good Stove" is a low cost efficient good stove of Magh series. http://goodstove.com . Also see [My Home Stove 2](http://myhomestove2.blogspot.com/) http://myhomestove2.blogspot.com/It is also safe, low heat conduction to the stove body mass, low weight, saves 30% to 50% fuel as compared to traditional stoves, convenient for using all types of biomass fuels. The temperature of the flame is around 400 to 500 degree centigrade and reaches maximum of 700 degree centigrade. Convenient for cooking all types of food. http://myhomestove.blogspot.com/ This stove lasts longer due to use of steel mesh inside, which is low cost and easily replaceable. Other wise majority of metal stoves last around one year only. This stove is named as My home because it appears like home.

Agricultural Residues

Grasifier: a Switchgrass burning stove

30 January 2010 - 12:10pm

Pemberton-Pigott

Samson

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott and Roger Samson, January 2010

Grasifier

Roger Samson was here tonight and we made and tested a Grasifier: a Switchgrass burning stove based on the dimensions of the Vesto adapted to make a lower cost pellet burning stove for Haiti.

Power, 2.5 kw
Burn rate 8-10 g/min
Mass 550 g
Fuel load 600 g though it can hold 750

Lighted with two caps of paint thinners
The flame went completely blue (just before the end) then wobbled a lot and went out.
When it went out there was no smoke indicating there were no volatiles left.

Time to fabricate, about 30 minutes.

I see this as a burner that can be attached to the centre of a Haitian charcoal stove to convert it into very clean burning a pellet stove.

Char yield: 25% of the initial dry mass.
Moisture content of the initial fuel, about 7%

Ash: nearly none.

Regards
CrispinSneakers

Gasifier (microgasification)

Metal

Agricultural Residues

Switchgrass

Grass and Straw

Biomass Gasification Boiler Technology Evolves

19 October 2011 - 11:16am

As the United States biomass thermal and power industry continues to expand, new reliable technologies offering higher efficiency solutions must be introduced. The newly introduced EOS series biomass gasification boiler is among the most energy efficient of AESI’s high-performance, low-maintenance biomass energy plants. The EOS series provides thermal outputs ranging from 600,000 BTU/hr to 20 million BTU/hr, and can be staged to provide increased capacity.

Designed and built by the leaders in the biomass waste to energy market in Europe, Uniconfort, the EOS series builds upon over 50 years of experience and over 4000 successful installations throughout the world. When asked about the highly efficient EOS series, CEO of Uniconfort Davis Zinetti notes, “we must not forget that greater efficiency is associated with less CO2 production. Choosing EOS, therefore, means making a choice in favor of the environment.”

AESI EOS Series Biomass Gasification Boiler

Gasifier (microgasification)