Recently two of us from Biochar Products met with the president of ABRI. We wanted to discuss and get a better understanding of where ABRI felt they were going in the next year and how we at Biochar Products might fit into those plans.

It turns out that the efforts of ABRI running a 1 ton plant in Ottawa, another plant in New Zealand and our plant in Halfway have all contributed documents with our experience and needed improvements to ABRI in the last month or so. These accumulated experiences have been incorporated into modifications in the one ton plant in Ottawa for further testing.

There will likely be one or two more 1 ton plants built in the next year. These will be built with specification based on this years experience and will be further tested. 

Issues with Airlock

We have been working on testing the airlock we have been trying to get to work on the cyclone which is inside the reactor hotbox.

So far we have tested several types of bushings and drive rods. The way we make the airlock work is there is an airlock with 6 fins inline below the cyclone. Those are turned at a slow speed of less than 10 rpm.  The fins are on a shaft which extend outside the hotbox.

First we got a link on the IBI front page on the website. It will be up at least temporarily it is at:

http://www.biochar-international.org/

The link is below and is currently is the last of the "BIOCHAR newsbriefs" on the right sidebar on the site.

This last week we have been starting a discussion about just what it would take to build a plant that could be sold as a production plant.

We have been discussing the definition of a production plant. I have proposed that the definition be " A plant that can be run 24 hours a day, 5 days a week (weekend shutdown for maintenance)  for at least a 10 year life span and the plant can be run by a logging crew or equivalent".

We have shared the Biochar Products experience as far as the requirements that we believe are needed to make a production biochar plant for sale.  ABRI is now getting ready to compile those requirements with those from the New Zealand group that has run another 1 ton plant. And then include the experience they have had running the 1 Ton plant in Ottawa. This will produce a next generation design document.

It seems like a long time since I have been able to do an update on the news section. We have been in a big open area in the forest on the Umpqua National Forest near Diamond Lake, Oregon.

The last two weeks have been both exciting and challenging. The plant has been making good quality biooil and has not plugged up once on us the entire time we were running on this site. We are sure that good result is due to the airlock installed earlier in June. 

It turns out that the airlock was also the part of the plant that gave us virtually all the problems we had running during this two week period. It turns out to nobody's surprise that getting a moving part to work in an environment where the temperature is 400 to 650 degrees C is a rather difficult problem to solve. 

Last Thursday we finished all modifications on the plant including air lock and hydraulic improvements. Tests show it should now work much better producing clean oil and therefore not plugging up. This will be tested in the next two weeks on the Umpqua National Forest.

We moved the plant up to an area near Diamond Lake, Oregon for further actual testing. We believe we have all the modifications working and will test these modifications in actual operation. We will evaluate the success of these modifications before we do any more. If all goes well we will do further modifications.

I have a hard time getting entries into the news section because I am working in the forest and don't have access to a computer. I will update less often but hope to keep a dialogue going. We hope these modifications will really work out and solve some of the problems we have had in the past.

We were in Newberg working with PC Engineering last week. 

We got the airlock installed at the base of the internal cyclone. It is basically a tube with a six fingered star shaped part inside rotating slowly run by a small electric motor. 

This airlock prevents gas from being drawn up from the bottom of the cyclone while letting char that is knocked out of the gas stream by the cyclone to fall into the shot auger where it should be and the remaining clean gas to be passed on to the oil condensation section of the reactor.

PC Engineering in Newberg, OR is making modifications to the 1 ton plant that will give us the ability to gather new data needed to properly modify the plant so it can produce clean biooil by resolving much of the char in the smoke issue.

We will also be picking up a used generator that can run the plant when away from electric power sources. We managed to find a 20 KW diesel generator that can run on regular diesel, biodiesel and waste motor oil if filtered to 5 microns. This is a very tough engine and we are hoping that we will eventually be able to run it on biooil produced by the plant. We will not test it with biooil until we get some external tests on the biooil and see if it meets our needs. In the mean time we hope to be able to run it with waste motor oil.

The modifications to the plant that will be tested initially will be the addition of a pressure gauge and a gas flow speed  sensor that will allow us to calibrate the fan speed to get the proper speeds through the cyclone. These pieces of information are needed to properly engineer the elements of the gas flow and cooling system properly to remove the char particles. Up till now we have had only 8 thermocouples that gave us temperatures at different points in the process. These are not enough information to do the engineering needed to build a proper particulate removal system.

We delivered the plant to the PC Engineering shop the end of last week and we spent Friday afternoon and Saturday showing the team that will be making modifications the plant.

We met with 4 people on Friday and spent several hours discussing the general operation of the plant. These discussions included how this older ABRI plant compared to the new plant now running in Ottawa, Canada.

We discussed how this plant uses steel shot as a heat maintenance medium and how the newer plant uses ceramic shot for that purpose. In addition the way the char is separated from the shot in this plant is with a trammel screen which filters out the char and recirculates the shot.  The new plant blows air across the shot blowing the char out of the shot. That this difference is not critical since both work. The reason the new method was put into place was that there were far fewer things to break so long term less maintenance would be required on the new type plants but the old method works fine for now.  So we all feel there is no need to replace this to bring our plant up to good working order.

We will be taking the 1 ton biochar plant to the Portland area later this week. We are working with a small engineering/fabrication firm in a small town west of Portland called Newberg. We will depart Halfway on Thursday and drive to Portland delivering the plant to the engineers on Friday morning.

We will be first discussing modifications needed to the plant to resolve the char in the oil issue. We will look into cyclone modifications and possibly some high temp filtering systems. These modifications will be then completed and we will then go back to Newberg to test the plant and see if we have in fact solved the problem.

In addition either during these modifications or after we have these modifications in place we will develop controls and monitoring information systems.

Last Friday I met with a small engineering/fabrication company to look over a list of possible improvements to the plant to bring it up to the standard where it can run in a production mode.

The primary modifications discussed are the possible solutions to the problem of getting char in the oil.  We are discussing a new idea that we really had not thought of before along with the ideas I referenced in the previous post. We had been considering making modifications to the air flow through the internal cyclone and/or adding a second cyclone and filter.

A few days ago I was studying the way industrial cyclones function. They are pretty common in applications where there is a need to separate dust or particulates from air streams. The statement that helped us identify a possible problem is as follows:

We have finally reached the point were we are fairly confident we can make no more progress until we make some modifications in the plant to make it work better. 

One of the issues, that seems to be a kind of deceptive issue,  is the status of char that is not separated from the smoke. It seem while we are running the plant that we are making oil without a problem. It turns out that we are making biooil alright but we are also destroying that which we have made by contaminating it with char. The char soaks up the biooil and eventually fills the cooling tank to such a degree that it can no longer cool the smoke to make biooil. This char soaked oil also tends to plug up the biooil cooling system as well creating quite a mess to clean up.

We have basically gone trough this process in two different ways. First at lower char making temperatures of between 350 and 400 degrees C which yields a grainy char substance in the bottom of the cooling tank that will not flow and plugs up the system which pumps the biooil. Second we also used a higher char making temperature between 420 to 460 degrees C which yields a gooey heavy tar like substance that also sinks to the bottom of the cooling tank but eventually builds up to a point where it can be pumped through the oil cooling system causing a lot of plugging of the venturi system and is not an effective coolant causing problems with the biooil making system.

We seem to be making progress all the time. The real issue is that now we get 5 or 6 good runs that are limited by oil overheating. We are still getting periodic break downs that require dismantling part of the plant and fixing the problem usually every 8 to 10 hours of operation.

These issues and the heating problems with the biooil seems to be the next things that need to be solved to get the plant to a production type operation.

Our discussion with partners now is can we bring in some engineering help to work on the problems that will be needed to actually resolve these issues once and for all. We are now at the point that we have them pretty well documented but do not have the skills or capabilities to resolve the issues that we are now aware of.

We spent the last week or so trying several ideas to solve the problem of not making much oil because of char in the oil.

Since the Forest Service wanted more char we had gone to running at lower shot temperatures basically under 350 degrees C. This dose produce more char and less oil but we discovered that most of the additional  char produced is just light char and ends up in the oil.

So starting this week we went back to running above 400 degrees C for shot temp. That turns out to be a very good idea we are now getting much less char in our oil and we are starting to get longer runs because we have more oil to cool since we are not destroying most of it with char.

We have discovered two major problems with the current design of this demonstration plant currently has that make it not perform as designed.

The first is that the biooil cooling system just doesn't work to keep the biooil below 70 Celsius. This it seems is mostly due to the fact that the interface between the antifreeze piped through the biooil tank just is not functioning adequately.  The biooil flows through the tank fairly quickly rather than in a more circuitous route that would bring it into better and longer contact with the cooling lines.

The next thing we will do to try and solve this problem is that ABRI will be sending us a set of baffling to install in the tank that will hopefully improve this cooling. We don't know how long it will take for us to get the baffling but we will not be running much for the time till it arrives.

I see it has been quite some time since I made put in and update. We have been very busy during that time.

We continued to struggle with excess heat and finally put a flair on the plant to get rid of excess syngas so we could continue to run rather than overheat and have to stop.

This lead to new discoveries of problems that had been around since the beginning that we have not been aware of. At least they are all in the same area and we have taught ourselves the skills to find them.

After we put the fan in we got a lot better airflow of the smoke produced during char creation. This is great, we no longer have any problems with the internal smoke cyclone plugging up.

The problems we are dealing with now are related to the temperature of the biooil cooling system. We have discovered if the surface of the venturi is to hot the heavy oil cooks to the outside metal surface and accumulates eventually plugging up the system. By the same token if the outside metal is too cool it accumulates the heavy biooil and it is too thick to run off and it eventually plugs just as if its too hot.

We are currently exploring ways to keep this temperature of the outside metal in the range that makes good biooil and doesn't plug up. One of the tactics we have employed has been to add or remove insulation on various parts of the outer surface of the metal surfaces. So far this seems to have worked and we seem to have it about right but not quite.

During this past week we didn't get as much done as we had hoped. We did finally get the new larger fan on Wednesday and it took till Thursday to get modifications of parts of the plant required so they could be installed.

This was not nearly as quickly as we would hoped but it is done now. We did get to run for a few hours on Friday afternoon and the initial testing looked good and we are now hopeful we can get longer hours of operation than we have been able to do in the past. We also found that while running the plant we could run it faster (put more biomass through per hour) which will let us actually get 1 ton per day.  All of these results look promising but we will not know till we actually have time to run longer periods.

We are anxious to get started next week and see if we can make more progress towards our goal of operational functionality of this plant.

This past week a representative from ABRI visited the Biochar Products site in Halfway to help us see if we could solve the problems that were still preventing us from running the plant for longer periods of time.

We had discovered that 4 hours or a bit more was all that we could run the plant without plugging up the oil cooling system in one way or another. The person from ABRI , who had run this plant before it was delivered to us,  worked with us to see if we could solve the problems of plugging the oil cooling system that had apparently been created by some modifications made to the plant before it was delivered to Biochar Products on the trailer.

The plant had been modified in two ways, the biooil cooling system had been enhanced and the insulation in that both the hot box and the dryer furnace had been improved a considerable amount so less heat was required to run the plant (this is why we are being able to run on syngas rather than use propane all the time). These modifications were needed to make the plant have the potential to be run for long periods of time more like a production facility.

On Thursday 1/14/2009 we held and open house so people could see the 1 Ton plant in operation.  We had over 40 people attend. We are trying to get local residents to be able to see what it would be like to have a biochar plant in Pine Valley during the winter.

We also made time for people both local and from other towns in Oregon and some in Idaho to learn about biochar and biooil and how it is made. We also had a lively discussion on the benefits of each. We also has a good discussion on the possibility of this industry becoming more widespread in the West.

We will be having more opportunities for others too come and see the plant as posted on the home page:

   All open houses will be from 1:00 to 3:00 pm ALL are welcome
 
        Tuesday, Wednesday  and Thrusaday
        January   19, 20 and 21

        Tuesday, Wednesday  and Thrusaday
        January   26, 27 and 28

 Plant planned be operating full time during these days.
 Due to the fact that plant is prototype it may not be running if problems occur.