3 ms·
Drying plants in the sun is a surprisingly effective way to heat a building, I grew up with it. The problems are: burning wet stuff is terrible (surface wetnes
by swiley 7y ago
Drying plants in the sun is a surprisingly effective way to heat a building, I grew up with it.
The problems are: burning wet stuff is terrible (surface wetness isn’t bad, it’s the moisture inside the biomass that causes problems.) Secondly you can’t just straight up burn it because you’ll get a lot of heat that you don’t need so you’ll usually burn it in cycles and you’ll get a lot of soot at the beginning and end of the cycles so you need to either wash the exhaust or make sure you don’t have nearby neighbors downwind (in places like this that means within a quarter mile or so.)
- Pfhreak 7y agoFor sure, excess heat is something that is interesting to explore. Oregon Kilns are basically just a big metal bucket that burns top down and produces biochar, but burns off the syngas. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/or/newsroom/stories/?cid=nrcseprd1499267 https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/or/newsroom... Other systems try to capture the syngas/bio oil to generate electricity or capture the heat for heating/other uses.
- darksaints 7y agoOne of the more interesting approaches toward wet biomass utilization is Hydrothermal Liquifaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_liquefaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_liquefaction Basically you dump the wet biomass in a high pressure medium temperature reactor, and the water content of the biomass becomes supercritical, then acts as a solvent to break down the biomass into an usable crude oil (fairly similar to fossil crude, but with more oxygen content). This crude can be used directly as a fuel, or it can be upgraded (hydrogenated) into graded fuels like gasoline.