At 11:40 AM 5/15/04 +0000, you wrote:
>-
> hi walt. what do you want for the steam engine?? we want to run one
>as an adjunct to our 25hp boiler which runs our biodiesel plant and
>distillery.we would love to use an old timey steam motor to run a
>generator..we want a cogeneration segment as part of our fuel
>production system.
It looks like a historical association has come together to purchase
the
steam engine and return it to it's original use, that of powering a
carousel that's maintained by a local community.
The reason we decided to not use the old engine for the purpose you're
describing is that there are new engines available that will do the job, so
we figured that it didn't make sense to put the wear and tear on an antique.
Consequently we replaced the 5 hp antique with a 1 hp engine from Mike
Brown.
http://home.earthlink.net/~dlaw70/12stmng.htm
The plan is to use a "thermal battery" to store heat and then use that
heat to operate the smaller steam engine 24x7. If one's primary focus is on
electrical generation, then going with a larger engine makes sense, but
when you're talking about co-generation, and the generation of electricity
is ancillary, then the smaller set up is easier to work with, develop and
control. We're in a net metering situation, so we're just looking to
replace the electricity we use, not to try and produce a surplus.
>P,S. are you talking about destructive distillation of methanol or
>using the chips for gasification? we are fitting out six wheel drive
>duece and a half with a chipper and a portable sawmill so we can
>implement a resource recovery program here in the Smoky mountains
>recovering bettle killed trees and recycling them
The path we're pursuing is to convert the woodchips into syngas, and
then
condense that into methanol.
There have been two major developments in that area. The first involves
grinding up the zinc oxide catalyst into a powder that's slurried with
mineral oil. This allowed the through-pass conversion rates to climb from
the traditional 5% per pass to around 20%. Just as importantly, it allowed
the use of a micro reactor, i.e. the engineering tests that were used to
design the plant described in the link below was a six foot length of one
inch diameter stainless steel pipe.
http://www.lanl.gov/projects/cctc/factsheets/estmn/csliquiddemo.html
The second involves a co-catalyst system developed by Dr. Mahajan which
allows the reaction to proceed at much reduced temperatures and pressures
(100 PSI and 150 C) The co-catalyst is also much less sensitive to the
presence of CO2 in the feed stream. This route is especially interesting
because it raises the single pass conversion rate up to better than 90%. At
that point, you can burn off the uncondensed gas and not have to worry
about the accumulation of inert gases (i.e. N2) in the reactor.
The url for the published patent application is long so I'll just
invite
those who are interested to go to
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html
and search for mahajan and methanol. The information is under patent
application number 20030158270.
Currently we're undertaking to install a 100' tower and wind generator
in
order to produce quantities of H2 and O2. We're planning on using O2
(instead of air) to drive the thermodynamics of the conversion, and will
use the H2 to adjust the ratio of CO to H2 in the syngas.
Hope this helps clarify what we're doing.
Walt
http://www.windward.org/
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