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Pastimes : Triffin's Market Diary -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Triffin who wrote (311)	3/29/2007 3:48:50 PM
From: Triffin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 869

BC: TERRA PRETA SOLAR FURNACE .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. A tubular furnace, using an ordinary piece of large diameter iron pipe, heated by a solar energy reflector, would be the answer. Not dependent on its own output as a heat source, any solid organic material feedstock could be used - even wet leaves - and the product would take minutes to produce, rather than hours or even days as is needed for the usual methods. And virtually all the charcoal produced would be available as product, since none is consumed to provide the heat for the process. Push the raw, even wet feedstock in one end, and minutes later, finished charcoal comes out the other. What could be simpler or easier? So on consideration, the design worked out to something like this - a piece of pipe, blackened on the outside to facilitate the absorption of the heat, about three or four inches inside diameter, and about ten to fifteen feet long, is suspended over a trough reflector, shaped into a parabola in cross-section, with the pipe suspended at the focal point, parallel to the length of the trough. The trough would be about eight to ten feet wide, and is lined on the inside with the solar reflectorizing material, which is nothing more than shiny metal - in a pinch, aluminum foil, shiny side up, could be simply glued to ordinary sheet metal to provide the shiny surface (the shiny aluminum surface could be sprayed with clear acrylic to preserve the shine). The resulting device is mounted with the length on an exact east-west line. If this is done, the only adjustments that need to be made to keep the furnace operating at peak efficiency is to keep the reflector tilted to the current seasonal sun angle. No hourly or daily adjustments need be made. Simply push the feedstock in one end, and if it gets heated to more than 470 degrees during its transit through the pipe, out the other end comes low temperature charcoal, ideal for soil carbonization. Easy as that. For a third-world farmer without access to electricity, the furnace would be pretty much as described, with the feedstock being loaded from a small bin-like arrangement welded to one end of the furnace pipe. Feedstock would be pushed into the furnace pipe with tool consisting of a small pipe as long as the furnace pipe, on which a disk is mounted on the end, a disk somewhat smaller than the inside diameter of the furnace pipe. The disk's purpose is simply to force the feedstock into the pipe and through it, and clear blockages as needed. As feedstock enters one end of the pipe, the finished charcoal is simply pushed out the other. Gasses driven off by the heating exit through the feedstock end - the other end is left completely blocked by charcoal, which precludes the entry of oxygen and thereby keeps the efficiency high.