the potential for a small compact system that can be made mobile and put along side threshing, drying or milling machinery, and moved from site to site, is of great local interest. new things are possible when you move a gasifier towards a washing machine size object, away from a typical industrial plant size.
of course the current gek reactor will not handle small granular fuels like rice husk. we have other ones in process that will, and do so with good tar conversion in the reactor, so the same minimized clean up system will still be possible.
currentely we are running wood chips made locally, at about 30% moisture content. the totti heat recycling systems are giving us much more tolerance to run higher moisture content fuels. everything here is extrememly wet. air drying seems to only get things into the mid 20s moisture. our moisture meter on the fuels we’re chipping is reading 30% on average. that is the driest we can find without purpose drying the fuel.
even with this 30% moisture fuel, the restriction in the hearth is staying at 850-930c on a 3kwe load. this corresponds to 1200c or so at the nozzles most likely (but unmeasured). these are the temps we want to see for full tar conversion. we had a white filter and unmolested sawdust after our first runs yesterday.
the chipped fuel we’re running looks like this. we’re also using it in the bottom of the filter, as you can see here. the rest of the filter is filled with rice husk and sawdust.