Hi all, I am going to do something I swore I would never do. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time and know that the folks on this list know far more than me and can point me in the right direction. I live in a rural area where we are subject to occasional power cuts (power lines down mostly due to weather) but, more importantly, our power bills are rocketing as South Africa races to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of cost of power. Historically we had paid off coal fired power plants that gave us the lowest cost of power in the world. Anyway, now that power costs are rising, own generation is becoming an economic necessity.
In my area we have a large number of dairy farms milking >500 cows. These are sizeable operations and the manure they produce is worth pursuing. Typically they all have slurry dams and they spread their manure from time to time (much to our temporary dismay while the odour kills us!). The question is: what is an economical way of producing gas? Bear in mind, efficiency is not an issue in this case. What we are talking about is getting gas that can be cleaned up and fed into motors to produce power. I am looking at using 3 litre petrol engines that will push out about 50kW tops. So, we are not looking for anything fancy. A plugflow system would make most sense as they can pump it into the one end while the processed material leaves the other. Heating suggestions? What about using the engine exhaust to heat water and circulate that around the reactor or use it to preheat the incoming feed? Here I was simply thinking of a double tank with hot water in the outer tank... any other suggestions? The other thing these farmers use a lot of is sileage (chopped maize that is stored and allowed to ferment). Has anyone had experience adding some of this to the AD? Looking forward to hearing from you all! Rex _______________________________________________ Digestion mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/digestion_lists.bioenergylists.org for more information about digestion, see Beginner's Guide to Biogas http://www.adelaide.edu.au/biogas/ and the Biogas Wiki http://biogas.wikispaces.com/
