So I am prototyping a dual purpose barrel stove heater / charcoal fuel processor. The idea here is to produce charcoal for engine fuel while reclaiming as much heat in the process as possible. This first one here is a prototype / proof of concept. If this works a refined version will be built with a lower enclosure to enclose the catch barrel and keep ambers at bay.
Here is a quick video of our prototype kiln in action. I plan to build a number of these this year to mass produce charcoal. This is a hands down easier way to make fuel for gasification. These barrels we can get free and can be DIY'd or we offer our kit with lower enclosure. Still a very low cost solution compared to a $2500 chipper or an even more expensive chunker. Oh you thought you were going to use a Harbor Freight chipper? Yeah thats just simply not going to work we been there already.
The kiln shown here in the video if you work the machine it will produce 10 to 15 gallons of fuel pr hour. You could easily run 4 or more of these kilns. So think about that in one hours time running four kilns you could produce 60 gallons of fuel. You will never do that with raw fuel gasification not even close!!! You can process fuel a number of ways. Fallen trees its just like processing fire wood. you just process it a bit finer as you will split the wood to smaller proportions for faster break down in the kiln. Free pallets can be processed very fast with a circular saw and a chop saw. All this equipment can be ran from electric. Our Poulan electric chainsaw is a beast. We plan to get a new lipo chain saw in the near future and will charge it directly from chargas. If you think processing few fuel for gasification think about how your going to run that equipment. Its sacrilegious to run on gasoline and it will be cumbersome to use a gasifier; you are then right back to burning biomass to create the biomass for gasification. It is deceiving but you will use more fuel to run the chipper than you will running a kiln. Then you will have time into sorting that fuel. oh no, it is not ready to run after chipping. Nope thats not how this works. You must sort that fuel for uniformity and that is time consuming and tedious. Then you have to dry it. Charcoal can be ready to run in an hour after leaving the kiln.
So here we are running an outside test with a short 4 inch chimney and I think we have a successful machine here. This is made out of stuff we just have laying around. The refined version will have a 6 inch flue adapter.
Also is a pic the catch barrel set up under the unit.