[Terrapreta] Overview on biochar production methods

[Jeff Davis]

Tom, interesting. 
..

Some say that Terra Preta charcoal needs to be a pure as the driven snow.
Others say it needs to be high in volatiles, understandable at this point.

The only thing I can say is this: About a week ago I made some of the
nicest cherry wood chips with the WC6. Used up my hog dressed cherry
lumber that I had stashed for about ten years. It wouldn’t work for the
Imbert crowd but looks like good fuel for the Gas-of-Fire 1000,
stratified.

I plan on fueling the Gas-of-Fire with one or two GGE of these chips and
measure the amount of charcoal produced. I know of no way for me to
measure the amount of gas produced but if it wasn’t too costly maybe I
could send a sample of the charcoal, somewhere, to be analyzed. Maybe some
of the chips for moisture content.

Anybody know where I could send these samples to be tested???


Best regards,

Jeff



Tom wrote:
>Your mention of Ankur raises an interesting point. A gasifier can make char
>by removing charcoal faster than you reduce it to gas. We did some
>experiments with a 200 kWe Ankur gasifier. During normal operation char
>production is about 5% with a  volatile Matter (VM) content of about 10% .
>When we ran at a high char withdrawal rate we were making about 10% char
>with a VM of 28%.  The point is that if you run a gasifier as a pyrolyzer
>then the quality of the char is likely to change.



-- 
Jeff Davis

Some where 20 miles south of Lake Erie, USA