After running the GEK some, I had a thought for transferring some heat to the hopper. Simple idea, I am sure someone has checked it out. Just add a heat shroud around the lower part of the gas cowling and extend up to cover part of the hopper barrel with a inch or less space created for the heat to rise up and be transferred to the hopper. If anyone has tried this or has thoughts about how useful it might be I sure would like to hear about it.
I did go ahead and try out a cobbled up version of this. I will add a picture to my gallery to show what I did. I took surface temps of the hopper before and got readings of about 130f tops. After adding the shroud, I got readings of 180f to 200f at bottom where the shroud covered and 160f to 170f at the upper part of the hopper. Also made it a lot cooler to be close to the GEK where temps on the c\gas cowling are in the 400 to 500 range at times.
Have not looked inside the hopper yet to see if I can tell any difference inside- needs to cool down.
Gas temps coming out into the cyclone did not show any difference, do not think it changed the dynamics of heat loss out of the gas cowling.
any thoughts?
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modification for GEK hopper
Started by timberdoodle, Jun 30 2010 10:58 PM
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#2
JayAlchemAPL
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Posted 10 August 2010 - 08:37 PM
Great that you added a heat shroud to the hopper. We have started adding insulation around the inside of the gas cowling and along with the reactor as well. With the auger drying bucket add-on, the exiting gas heats up the incoming biomass which dries the biomass before it is introduced to the pyrolysis zone. This separation of the pyrolysis zone and drying reduces the competition of the zones.
Where there is water condensate, the pyrolysis vapor will tend to want to agglomerate around the water particle. This will facilitate in larger tar particles which will tend to insulate their core from cracking temperatures which will create more complex tertiary tars in the combustion zone.
It seems like it is better to completely separate these zones, which could mean that you will want to avoid the transitionary zone between the 100-200C.
thoughts?
Where there is water condensate, the pyrolysis vapor will tend to want to agglomerate around the water particle. This will facilitate in larger tar particles which will tend to insulate their core from cracking temperatures which will create more complex tertiary tars in the combustion zone.
It seems like it is better to completely separate these zones, which could mean that you will want to avoid the transitionary zone between the 100-200C.
thoughts?
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