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#Post#: 2178--------------------------------------------------
New here, just looking for someone to tell me where to go..... l
ol
By: MountainGuardian Date: April 9, 2014, 11:53 am
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I have been studying the idea of producing a small amount of
electricity utilizing wood chips as a fuel source, I own a
sawmill and my friend down the road owns a tree trimming company
and he produce many tons of wood chips each month. We both live
out in the country and each have a forty acres to work with, I
have large shops and am fully equipped for sawmilling, wood
finishing, welding, cutting and forging etc.. I am pretty good
at designing and building pretty much anything. I was thinking
of resetting up my giant stove that I made about 6 years ago at
my last farm, it is handy because it will accept up to 10"
diameter material up to five feet long, makes it handy for
burning brush and garbage wood etc. It is an old 250 gallon
fuel tank and will hold right about 1/4 cords of wood at a time
and will burn for up to 3 days when shut way down.
I got to thinking with a bit of modification I could use that to
burn wood chips and potentially create electricity as well as
household heat with it. I went looking for steam engines and
turbines for sale and was not very impressed, steam turbines are
out of the question way to big for what I would need, and the
engines, well they may as well be made of gold for the prices
they are asking for them.
I decided that if I were to go through with this idea I would
have to build my own steam engine. After a couple of day of
thinking about I realized that an idea I designed a few years
back would lend itself well to a simple steam engine. I
designed a simple camp electric generator to run off of propane,
a single tube 12 inches long with a single free floating
unconnected piston within. A combustion chamber at each end of
the tube ping pongs the piston back and forth, the outside of
the tube being your coil to generate your power and the piston
being the electromagnetic field to induce a voltage. An
incredibly simplistic idea, like the shake up battery. Not
quite so simplistic an idea when it comes to timing though, and
a free ping ponging piston would be quite problematic not to
mention now effective way to radiate the heat from the unit in a
simple way. While this idea is a bit of a bust for the
originally intended process I realized it lent itself well to
steam with some slight modifications.
For steam, 4 inches of travel in each direction with a six inch
piston, a five inch slot cut into the side of the tube
containing the piston, this slot allows for a post to be run out
the side of the piston. The post is then hooked to wheel with
an offset post via an arm. The post travels back in forth
within the slot powering the wheel. The cylinder and piston
would be a dual action, steam entering from each end timed for a
push pull, the steam exhaust from one end would trigger the
intake for the other end. Running two of these systems opposing
to each other would help to negate the jumpines inherent to such
a system.
At this point I envision one long tube with and individual setup
at each end, two push pull dual stage pistons one at each end.
Each side hooked to your center wheel drive. The piston can
easily be fitted with a grease reservoir and grease zirc for
keeping it lubricated, the piston can be drilled to allow
passages for steam exit when they line up with holes drilled in
the containing tube.
So far this all fairly simple and easily accomplished, except
that I do not know how to go on the timing of the steam, what is
out there, I am pretty certain a ball valve system will not be
good enough. The piston presented a problem at first beings
that at high temps rubbers and plastics will not hold up, but I
should be able to use leather easily enough on that as long it
is well impregnated with oil and grease. Even if one hat to
replace the piston leather it would be a pretty simple and easy
process, just make a couple extras that one can simply unscrew
the end and pull the old one out and slip a new one in. Replace
the leather on the removed piston and repeat when needed.
My know how is lacking in the department of what is available to
use, and what sizes of piston and travel will require what kind
of steam pressure and cfm to run.
I will probably come across as crazy to most people, that is
fine, I am used to that, everyone that knows me considers me to
be crazy, but then they also often tell me I am the smartest
person they know, I tell them they must not get out much....
lol...
I am quite capable, but there is information needed for this to
be successful, given enough time I would learn it all on my own,
but it seems that many of you should be able to increase my
learning curve by quite a bit on this idea.
#Post#: 2179--------------------------------------------------
Re: New here, just looking for someone to tell me where to go...
.. lol
By: lynx wind Date: April 9, 2014, 4:15 pm
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Welcome, you have the fuel, the space, the know how and tools,
and it sounds like you have ambition. I have been in steam for
30+ years, and everyone always wants to design their own and
better steam engine.
The engine is the dumb part. There are many good designs and
many very very simple ones. I would recommend a wobbler, dual
cylinder. You will be running at low rpm.
The hard part is the boiler. That really is the engine. I
would suggest staying away from any type of pressure vessel.
Take a look at top firing a monotube coil. The controls are not
complicated, but I suggest staying at low temps and pressures.
Under 400 F and 120 psi. A wobbler engine (oscillating) will
run happily at 40 psi. No, it isn't as efficient as high temp
high pressure, but it works, its safe and reliable.
The other hard part is the alternator that will put out the
desired power at low rpm. We can help you with that.
#Post#: 2180--------------------------------------------------
Re: New here, just looking for someone to tell me where to go...
.. lol
By: MountainGuardian Date: April 9, 2014, 4:34 pm
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I really did not intend to make a boiler, I figured I would go
with tubes within the burn chamber and one way valves, something
like a coffee pot, but with a number of tubes being heated in
the burn chamber at once. This gets away from having to build a
heavy duty tank to hold steam pressure and reduce the likely
hood of explosions.
I can easily and cheaply buy pipe that will handle way more
pressure than I would need, in fact I have several hundred feet
of thick wall galvanized one inch water pipe out behind the main
shop. I have a 250 gallon water tank I figured I would set at
about 8 feet up and gravity feed the pipes in the stove through
one way valves and then one way valve out from there to a
collector pipe putting all the pipe outputs into one pipe to
feed with. This is a part of where my lack of understanding
comes into play, I would need to know what kind of cfm and
pressures I will need to get a good idea of how I want to design
this. I figured I would try to aim for around 200 psi, pipe can
easily handle much more pressure than that, that part of the
design seems easy enough and straight forward enough. But then
there could be things that I am as yet unaware of with that....
Creating pressurized steam seems like the easy part to me, but
then I build forges and foundry and am used to creating things
to melt metal and glass, making steam "seems" likely to be a bit
easier.
You have any pics of this wobbler design, I will try to go
looking for it, but in case I don't find it, would be nice to
see..... Or any links that show this design, just as good...
Thanks for the reply....
#Post#: 2347--------------------------------------------------
Re: New here, just looking for someone to tell me where to go...
.. lol
By: burnit0017 Date: April 18, 2014, 1:32 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CeeFkiePQ
Greetings and welcome to the forum. I started my project late
last year. The monotube boiler works great. My first attempt was
to complex and I need a better water pump. The copper tube is
easy to work with and is rated up to 500 PSI. I hope you post
some photos of your project.
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