Nils, Thank you for your coments and good luck with your development. I wondered where you had "disappeeared" but you clearly have been busy. The performance numbers are impressive.
Thermal applications are great, especially for gasifier devleopment and for difficult fuels. Just this week three companies have consulted me on the suitability of difficult fuels for their gasifiers or staged combustors. My obervation about 600 hours comes from more than 40 years of design and development of materials handling, wood and agricultural processing, and thermal conversion systems including gasiifers, burners and boilers. For example, last month we installed a materials handling system that we custom designed. While many of the components are common there are several unique features. The sytem operates 4.5 days (108 hours) per week. It has been operating with 100% availability since we started up but you still have issues related to operators,controls etc. Regular maintenance is performed on and offline. We have been through four different shifts or teams of operators. Each team has now run the system several times. After six weeks we have probably seen the last of the major issues. We have only designed and built about 15 of these system in 20 years. Every application has its challenges and with each design we find new ways to solve problems. So even though we have designed and built similar systems it still seems to take about 600 hours to work the kinks out of a new installation. Sometimes it will take three or four months before you get through 600 hours of production. Tom _____________________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of EP Engineering Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 12:49 AM To: 'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification' Subject: Re: [Gasification] [Spam] Re: Identifying and fixing technical and commercial roadblocks to commercial small-scale CHP gasifiers Dear Tom I agree with you more or less all the way. The utilities in Denmark speak about the first 700 hours in full operation, since you will afterwards only encounter 2 - 3% of all possible failures. In other words you have solved the 98%. The forerunner of our gasification system was sold by the manufacturer all over Europe without the company being aware of the system idea and expected performance. I initiated the development and was the project leader on the subsidized development back in early 90'ties, but I was too expensive for the rather small company to stay on after the successful prototype. No need to say they went into bankruptcy. I am not doing the same failures on the final model and your list is by the way the exact route I'm trying to follow - hoping to have the boiler company in by this summer. We concentrate on small systems running on local difficult and wet biomass and residues. We don't screen the biomass - we size all of it - hence we have no waste left. For a long time we ran on wood chips classified for district heating and utility boilers. Since it resulted in too many call outs, the host just decided to have a finer sized chip from this summer. We have been running 3.000 hours on a 400 kW thermal unit. 1.700 hours - on the rough chips - in a row this year on the running prototype. We combust the gasses in a nearby cyclonic combustor and CO is like 0 - 4 ppm at 4-5% O2. We haven't had dust measurements but they will be carried out later this year - if we get the boiler company in. From the prototype back in 1992 we had only 40 mg/nm3. This time we expect 10 mg/nm3 or even less if we apply a hot gas filter which is the case in the hopefully coming zero series # 1. We have demonstrated integrated drying with superheated atm. press. steam, use of the steam in gasification in the Low Temperature Thermo Chemical Reactor (LT TCR), burn out of the gasses at 1250 - 1300 °C and very clean boiler operation. We can do a full burn out of the chars and we can make a biochar that is activated and holds all nutritional matters in plant uptake conditions as well as having a water holding capacity. The phase B prototype will fire a 100 bar, 500°C steam boiler to run a steam engine at 50 kW electric performance. We expect a start up late July this year of the steam system. The steam boiler is of the generator type that normally only will accept oil or gas. Hence the high demands on the gasification process - but we don't care about tars - they burn well - and create no soot at these combustor temperatures. If the boiler company fails to invest in us, we are ready for others. Med venlig hilsen/Best regards Nils Peter Astrupgaard << File: Untitled attachment 00074.txt >> << OLE Object: Picture (Device Independent Bitmap) >> -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Miles Sent: 29. juni 2012 02:59 To: 'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification' Subject: [Spam] Re: [Gasification] Identifying and fixing technical and commercial roadblocks to commercial small-scale CHP gasifiers David, Generally if a piece of equipment can get through commercial production for 600 hours you will have discovered most of the unanticipated problems. It usually takes a couple of months of round the clock production to get to that point. Beyond that it takes another couple of thousand hours to verify operation and increase reliability. When you're hitting over 90% production every 24 hour day then it should get boring. With industrial biomass systems fuel quality, fuel sizing, drying, and feeding account for about 95% of the unintended stoppages/outages/downtime. If you are ready for commercial production then you have already solved the downstream problems like figuring out how to make good quality gas, gas cleaning and cooling, and gas use, whether it is a boiler or engine. The variety of biomass feedstocks in type, form size and availability is usually a challenge. A device is often developed on fuels with certain specifications. When things fail vendors complain that the fuel was non-spec. It happens all the time but it doesn't really help anybody. As a supplier you have to be prepared to supply or specify the fuel system along with the reactor. A major challenge for development companies has less to do with the technology and more to do with how you run a business. Some are business failures more than technology failures. People just have different talents for running startup businesses. Technology developers chronically waste a lot of money up front, delay in building and testing prototypes, have slow turnarounds on improvements, use equipment that won't stand up to the abrasiveness of biomass, etc. It doesn't take long before you run out of money. As in other businesses the good strategy is probably to develop a good product and then sell it to a company in a similar business, like a boiler company, that can take advantage of manufacturing capabilities that are used to produce other products. Sometimes the gasifier is just a "money magnet," a piece of pretty steel to attract investors. It is assumed that you can get it to work was you burn through the start-up funding. Sometimes it seems like we are very inefficient at using money invested in gasification but we may be no different than other industries. A common mistake is to try to export a gasification products too soon. In other equipment we say that you need to develop a domestic market before you try to export it. In the 1970s we saw a lot of gasifiers start out in universities then the prototypes were exported to developing companies before they were fully developed. Usually they rusted there unless the engineer or scientist who developed them showed up. Then they are very expensive to try to improve or maintain. We have many companies offering gasifiers have built one prototype and claim performance well beyond their demonstrated capabilities. It's fine for the prototypes and the first several commercial units to fail as along as the supplier stays with it and makes things work. We tend to criticize prototypes or initial installations that fail. We should applaud the success of those who have recovered from the failure by identifying the problem an designing around it in time to get back into production. We all have failures as we develop new systems. Sometimes developers can't continue development because the client has failed financially. Usually the grant money runs out before you get through commissioning. Those are just some of the many hazards in developing gasification systems. Add all that to a limited and fickle market and it's actually a pretty high risk activity. As they say, to make a small fortune in gasification you need to start with a large fortune. Tom -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Coote Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 5:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Gasification] Identifying and fixing technical and commercial roadblocks to commercial small-scale CHP gasifiers Thanks, Tom. A very useful study would be identifying at good resolution the reasons why small-scale CHP gasifiers fail technically and/or struggle commercially. Once that's clearly established suitable focus can be brought to bear on what is going wrong between pilot/demonstration and commercial phases with a view to fixing the issues. I think the same could apply to 2nd generation biofuels. Regards David > -----Oprindelig meddelelse----- > Fra: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] P? vegne af Tom > Miles > Sendt: 28. juni 2012 03:14 > Til: 'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification' > Emne: Re: [Gasification] Which of the gasifiers Tom listed are meeting > Knoef's commercial criteria > > David, > > It looks like you have the makings of a survey. :-/ > > Harrie's criteria are good and would be difficult for most suppliers > to meet. We want gasifiers to be as readily installed and operated as boilers. > > We should determine what needs to be done to get more suppliers over > all of these hurdles. > > Tom > > > > > > _______________________________________________ Gasification 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/gasification_lists.bioenerg ylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/ _______________________________________________ Gasification 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/gasification_lists.bioenerg ylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/ << File: Nils Peter Astrupgaard.vcf >>
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