An Interesting Design For Constant-Flow Charcoal / BioChar Production.. 

A great idea, Tim, with the potential to harvest either the waste heat from the chimney to heat your home/drying chamber, or the gases from the pyrolisation (as others have said). Rather than an auger, a continuous double chain with angle-iron welded across to make a conveyor would have the rollers and bearings protected from the heat, plus the structure could all be made of blocks, rather than a steel cylinder. Really looking forward to what your inventive mind comes up with!

An idea for stopping the charcoal combustion on the end would be to extend the pipe with the auger so that the charcoal has time to cool down before it exits the tube. It would require a quite long tube and auger, but if you only heat a third of the pipe it should work, this way you dont need to change the whole system, and the motor would also be placed further away from the heat....

Look into process tunnels. Generally these are inclined to use gravity, with paddles inside to agitate the process material. They're generally more reliable in these environments than augers.

I would go with a closed retort and capture the flammable gasses in a gasometer for later use.

We already tried that design. My Dad build a continuous Retort system. Go look at Hive Carbon in South Africa. No moving parts inside the combustion chamber is best. We build it vertical. Its all about the time exposed at a certain heat. My Dads system had been proven and been working for years now.😊

Tim - have you thought of a chain-conveyor instead of an auger? It might be more practical and would not have the potential to crush the friable charcoal like an auger. By chain conveyor, I mean a simple, fireproof conveyor belt made of a series of loops of chain welded together in parallel to make a wide belt. Edit: This idea would utterly fail to exclude any oxygen, but would at least roast the wood quite nicely.

Love your basic design and thought process. One minor thought, there may be some benefits to putting the auger motor on the cooler end. You probably already thought of that. I’m enjoying watching your charcoal plant evolve.

Make it as Archimedes screw instead of an auger. You can then turn the pipe from the outside. With the plasma cutter it should be easy to make. Cut a pipe in half and weld the dividers in place and bolt the pipe back together again. Using a set of metal rollers there would be no bearing problems because of the heat. If you made a sheet roller like, the pipe roller, you could make a pipe in any dimension needed. 🙂 A moving part inside a very hot pipe will have a lot of problems. It will easily warp and bend if any wood get stock. I now from test that the combustible gas part have a enough heat to complete the charcoal when the process as been started. So you only need some extra fuel in the start if the gas is used efficient. You will need a fairly good seal at the intake to force the combustible gas out. This can be done with a rotating feeder so that the top is never open directly to air.

Auger can move materials better than paddle,they make the tube inclined because material can not move effectively if tube is in level position.cheer!

Sounds like a good plan. How about your insulation in fact being your sand heat storage battery? You could redirect the chimney through your sand battery too to heat it up. If you do regular production burns you’ll be charging your sand heat storage battery every time you use it. In the winter you can direct your house heating circuit through the sand pit for winter heat and even have another circuit for hot water! Robin

Sounds great but what about some cheep steel drums that you could have on a sort of chain drive device that they lay on in the cooker and you can roll out the burnt ones and roll in the new ones they should be sufficiently sealed and could probably be vented easy and could put agitation lumps in the barrel to make sure they all move around well. Hope fhat makes sense.

Its an intresting design and would be fun to see it in action or atleast a test

Best with motor at feed end Good work Sandra Tim

I love your thinking Tim. I have been making bio-char in our firepit with my odd sized firewood (we heat exclusively with wood) during weekend campfire happy hour. It's amazing how inefficient a teepee lay fire is at completely combusting the wood. I douse the fire with water when the wine and cheese are gone and screen and crush the charcoal the next day.

50 gallon drums filled with charcoal and slap lid off to snuff out the oxygen. Then move the drum and repeat. The charcoal factories do this with a large dump container then close it off and let that charcoal cool. Then they just start up another one.

Merciful goodness this man's brain does not stop churning. Lol. What got me was I could follow all that he said. I amazed myself. Well done Tim. Good health and blessings to all ❤ and be safe.

Love the design. The auger could drop it into a big pile of ash. That is how Japanese binchotan charcoal is cooled and smothered after reacting with oxygen.

When I saw the work you were thinking about doing for this I got all excited. Then I saw you ALREADY tried something, that really got me. I know the feeling of starting something and it not working fully and having to go back to the drawing board. That really resonated with me Tim. I joined the Patreon to help fund your content. You don't push water bottles, try to get me to be a shadow legend hero. No you just want to dry some wood to heat your house, and as a bonus? You're doing it with a railway. Really hope others come around and we can turn that 200 Patreons to 2000!

Lovely stuff Tim! here's hoping you get this all up and running :} It seems very promising!

Dear Mr. Tim I guess a slightly angled rolling tube oven like the ones used in cement and lime producing factories could work for charcoal too. Please kindly allow me a suggestion: Maybe you should look how charcoal is produced by big facilities at first instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again. Maybe the professional solutions can be simplified and scaled down of course. Best regards, luck, health and wisdom.

In Austria some heating systems work with "Wood chips" (Hackschnitzel). The experience has shown that a square "pipe" for the auger will do wonders. I don't know if that will help you. But for your curiosity look at "Hackschnitzelheizung".

Wow, ambitious plan for the new furnace. Hope you make it happen Tim.

This is amazing. I was thinking through most of the video "but would it work?!" And then you show the old prototype! Of course :^D I love it!

Dude !!!! That is a totally awesome idea !!!! Thanks for sharing, there would be the problem though of keeping the oxygen out of the auger

Brilliant idea! As others have pointed out , the key thing is to make good use of the heat produced.

When the auger is longer you can create a cooling section after the burner.

Your continual inventiveness amazes me.

This is a very interesting topic. I can't wait to see and hear more.

Fascinating I can’t wait to see how you work through this. Frank

One of the best channels i've found lately, i'll try to recommend you

Sounds like a great idea. Curious to see what you come up with next.

so it needs to be continuous, bearings away from heat, forgiving for chips clogging, safe AND cheap. what an awesome challenge. use one of the two spirals that you already have, try to find a metal tube that fits nicely, weld shafts to the auger in the straightest way possible so the bearings can be mounted away from the heat. and go with this design that you just showed us, minus the holes on the top of the pipe, the moisture and wood-gasses should have a way to exhaust next to the feed, in a form of a pipe. at the receiving end you make an airtight catch tank for the coal

interesting concept! excited to see how you go about it

Interesting! Need a steam boiler over the fire one day to run a compressor for air to power the train. Heh heh.

I wonder if a large rotating barrel (like a big tumbler or old cement mixer) could be used and done in a similar fashion without needing the auger (as per suggestion below)

Great idea, with this type of design you could easily add another auger to feed wood chips into the fire as well

Thank you very much for sharing your design. Many questions occur to me, but they deserve much further thought first. But this is fascinating to consider, thank you

A.) You should absolutely try and salvage what you can of the old charcoal-cooker, saves money and the suggestions people are making for protecting the bearings/motor are brilliant B.) Will you have some sort of way to access the inner working of the cooker so you don’t have to cut away a bunch of material?

About the spontaneous combustion of the charcoal at the end, instead of cooling them with water. Drop them into a airtight box. Well, airtight in terms of incoming air. Need some pressure relief. But then you can cool it by preheating the air that goes into the blower. Put fins on the box and draw the blower suction air past them. Also, tip the augers down so that gravity assists. Finally... stainless steel! Haha expensive yes

They already make this exact machine. Worked in a factory with 3 of them many years ago. It's use to make liquid smoke flavoring.

I can't wait for the project to start

What an interesting idea. You are incredibly creative and persistent...

charcoal factory !! cool !

It is at this kind of time I wish I had paid attention to my thermodynamics and heat transfer lecture (or have a better teacher perhaps...) as I really want to try doing an analysis of such system and give helpful design suggestion. Can't wait to see you build and finish it!

I can't wait to see you build your next next charcoal machine!

A solution for the continuous process would be to push lidded containers through the heated chamber in a conveyer system. Completion of the process could be determined by testing the internal pressure at the outflow pipe. The containers could then be cooled before emptying and reusing.

This channel is just a hidden gem. I really envy your life, so if any land in Ireland is for sale let me know!

Hopefully the motor turning the screw is powered by the furnace heat. Good idea. Some societies in Asia build their beds on the furnace pipes for warmth and in house heating in the winter.

Lots of clever people here in the comments, I loving this discussion. Looking forward to the next installment Tim!

Good effort..

Very interesting, though i get the feeling something very similar to this should exist but i don't know very much on the subject

I LOVE it!! I’ve been working ideas for this kinda system to go into my Tesla Turbine Electric Generator because it can handle solid particulates fuels!! 🤤🤤🤤 This is exactly what I needed! Great idea!

I guess i’m not as stupid as people give me credit for ! When seeing the plan my very first thought was that the exiting charcoal would combust. I think the simple answer would be to have the exiting material furthest from the heat source. As for bearings, shielded, not sealed & they would need high melting point grease in them. If you make a short bearing tube with a bearing in each end you can then remove the shield from the inside of each bearing & push fresh grease in via a nipple between the two bearings.

Fascinating! This looks a lot like a type of heating furnace that was popular in Vancouver about 120 years ago. Rather than making charcoal, an auger fed sawdust into the furnace which could be fired by coal, wood or charcoal. Once hand started, the auger was steam driven--about as close to a perpetual motion machine as one could get! Of course, that's no what you're after designing, but I thought the similarity was interesting.

Alternative: not auger-in-tube, a look-alike water wheel but metal, turns slowly in metal container outside of which passes combustion exhaust (hot). Heating fuel is the volatiles boiling off wood chunks (chips not required, but small enough to fit in wheel chambers) which are ducted out of metal container into firebox. Forced air no, construct tall chimney which creates vacuum.

Cool stuff, as always :)

For cooling, you could use a second auger that is separate from the one in the flue so the heat doesn't transfer as easily. Plus you could have it rotate horizontally at the inclosed transfer point and be able to make separate piles or fill separate holding bins by moving it back and forth.

I think you are really close with this design. Extending the augur tube on the exit side some distance would allow it to cool. Also, drawing the intake air for the forced air down across the cooling part of the charcoal exit tube might help cool the charcoal below the spontaneous combustion temperature. I sawnutwiss's suggestion of a chain conveyor might be cheaper

Very interesting.

A nice idea...the charcoal could drop right in a water bassin... Biggest Problem is the loss of energy...so if there would be a use, it would be much more thrilling for upscale.

You have all the best toys.

You truly are a thinking man bro, give it a month and you will be able to buy one on amazon, lol. Enjoyed this video. Safe travels

I like your idea. One way you could change it and maybe be a little more efficient without spending so much money, you could have multiple chambers with different heat levels for each one, so they go through stages. Less wear and tear on the first couple of chambers. Another way to be a little more efficient would be to make the tube around the outside out of copper, because copper conducts heat more than steel. I like your idea about the underwater thing. Honestly, back to the copper tubing you could just sheet the tube and copper. It would be a little more efficient. At first the cost would be a little higher, but I believe it will save more energy. Suppose you could find a auger that is long enough to travel throughout the whole process? Like if it took 50 foot to do the whole process? If you had the tube and auger, copper plated and heated it at the end, I believe it would be more efficient and get the results you desire. another thing to consider is having the bearings on a longer shaft at the end in a cooled environment. Much like a spit on the grill. The engine or motor could be on the outside and out of the heat environment. Perhaps a double tube system. The innertube would be plated and copper along with the auger, and the outer tube would be for collecting the gases. The outer to could be clay lined with copper on the inside. Think of a tube and auger long enough to get this accomplished? perhaps the auger itself could have clay tiles attached to it much like the space shuttle, then plated with copper to keep the heat off the auger system. perhaps a way to keep the charcoal from igniting would be to have it vacuum sealed? The way copper expands like much other metals, it could expand to seal, or even have some of the auger be a little bit larger near the end to make a seal so the last bit of the process it would enter into a vacuum, sealed compartment, where there was no chance for it to ignite. maybe the auger would have to be 100 feet or maybe even 200. if you angled the auger at a downward angle, and it was sealed enough, you could have the auger going into a pool when it was finished and then continue on to be dropped into a receptacle at the end after it’s had its bath. The auger could be shorter.

I would skip the auger and run it as a rotating kiln instead, ie a leaning barrel/pipe rolling on bearing blocks. Fewer complex parts exposed to heat that way.

I worked on the design of the control & safety systems for a medium sized pilot plant 20 years ago. It was the same principle, using an inclined rotary kiln, with a rotary valve at the hot end for the feedstock. But it was self sustaining once the coal started to gas off. It ran for a number of years before it was mothballed. Quite a dangerous bit of equipment actually.

Could you use a chain conveyor or a the some like that. Basically attach a large steel circle or square on to a cable or chain and pull it through the tube or box. That way you can keep the bearings away from the heat as well as the drive motor. It won't plug either. You could use flat bar welded together to make a square tube and a paddle wheel to pull the chain. Good luck

In my opinion, with such a solution, the problem is the accumulation of tar on the conveyor or the damaging effect of high temperatures on the conveyor, and the difficulty in controlling the purity of the exhaust gases from the chimney.

In the company where I work we develop a similar system for 2 years now. We heat the reactor auger with elektricity, the combustable gases are sucked out and processed, so they can be used in an engine or heating...the hot coal is cooled in a second auger with water jacket...the motors are far away from the augers and power them via a chain drive.

Interesting 👍😃

Interesting idea. I could see an issue with the wood liquor fouling the process though.

The auger should have the motor on the cold side infront of the hoper and no bearing on the other side and the auger pipe extended well past the heat source where the outer casing can be cooled with water and having a hinged plate over the end of the auger casing . The charcoal will make a plug at the end of the pipe so no oxygen can enter to burn the the charcoal to ash . The auger should be about 100 mm shorter than the auger casing

Great creative thinking. Do remember that at these temperatures the fire would quickly eat through the steel innards. A common problem with rocket mass heaters that were made with a steel flue. It just corrodes away very rapidly

I love this idea, I am experimenting on a small level, made my first two charcoal briquette blocks yesterday. Experimenting with added sawdust. I am studying civil engineering part of our job is identifying a working system and optimising it, this usually leads to keeping the design, but losing material or makong maintenance less, sometimes this process leads to even better results. I would like to work on this as a side project, students are poor, we need to keep things cheap.😊

Perhaps the exiting charcoal exiting the first augur could go to a second one was wrapped in a water cooling jacket?

I got wondering about a longer auger and pipe. One section to cook the charcoal, and a second additional section to cool the charcoal. Of course, that extra length causes more bearing and friction complications

I have been thinking about a design like this for the last two months. I thought about augers like you used from my farming days and thought the bearings and motors would cook. Chain augers with stainless steel could work. I also thought about a modified grain drier with a very wide chain feed. A rotary crusher at the end with a sprayer to cool the Charcoal could work and seal the system. Designed well the feed stock could heat drive a turbine!

Really interesting topic. I'm a non native speaker. Cooking wood to charcoal, i wasn't aware of yet.🖖

yep.....auger jamb nightmare.... gravity feed? rotate the whole chip drum....like a cement factory? external drive away from and heat.

Great idea Tim for the charcoal, I was thinking about CARBON GRAPHITE BUSHINGS FOR HIGH TEMPERATURE as the melting point of Carbon is 4099°C plus they can be cheaply made to order, most likely any place that sells them will have something that will suit your needs.

Brother, believe me when I tell you I have a foil hat, slide rule, and a big imagination, so this is not from judgement or kicking you in the shin for inventing and trying to make the world a better place. This would be a tough one, variations in the wood, the volatile compounds contacting the steel under heat, with the friction constantly removing the scale that protects it from further corrosion....timing, one end of the batch may need more time than the other, so speeding up or slowing down, one part gets under or over cooked. All the bugs you mentioned can certainly be worked out, but you would need a titanium auger, I don't think coated would work as the heat cycles would cause separation. I've worked in coke plants, big money, big resources, hundreds of ovens, even with a much more consistent fuel. Neat idea, you got a whole stack of better ones, that are definitely worth sinking time and money in.

There are only three channels I have clicked the bell for. This is one of them.

Can’t wait

I expect that one day we'll see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang come out of your shop. Please?

If you wanted to do a continuous process, I'd use a slanted pipe with a rotary airlock on each end. I'm not sure if it would pass your wood chips though. If the output end had a water jacket, that would both solve the ignition problem and also heat the water for your house.

Isn't this similar to how they cook limestone to make cement? Might be worth looking at.

You can dry the woodchips before entry with the combust gases of the furnace. instead of focusing on a single combustion chamber with a mekanism to move material within, you can have three stationary chambers. One firing, one cooling down & one heating up with the combusted gases. Then you can have a rotary mekanism to feed woodchips & collect charcoal from/to hoppers respectively.

One other thing you might want to try is pyrolysis of plastic waste, instead of charcoal you would make petroleum-coke and some crude fractions of oil which may help to further seal the system from outside air. I've always wanted to do something like this, its interesting to think that in the midst of high fuel prices we are virtually surrounded by plastics with the same chemical makeup as petrol. If this sounds interesting to you just make sure that the plastics used are non-halogenated and sulphur free (ie: no PVC, no Nylon, no Teflon, no Rubber), otherwise the combustible gasses made will contain some unhealthy chemicals, but if done right its just as clean as charcoal-making.

This great news to the world

Like others, I'm thinking some kind of conveyor but I can't quite picture it. Like little train coal cars; or the treads of an escalator (but instead of a tread, a box with open top). When a car exits with hot charcoal, the track aims downhill 90 degrees like a roller coaster dumping its load of charcoal into water.

You could look into cooling the charcoal the same way I condense poitin by using icy water. I used to have a freezer full of icy water, 12v pump from a quad weed sprayer and cooper coil the pipe from the freezer around the the hot pipe cooling it instantly. Ran everything on a silent generator.

Nice idea. I also had a tried and tested way to produce charcoal which I have used many times. It is simply to have a stove with a straight chimney but with a very large grate. By that I mean the holes in the grate are very large about 10-10cm. All you do is light a fire on the grate and as the wood turns into charcoal it falls through the grate and into the ash pan as charcoal ready for you to scoop it up. There however does need to be a way of regulating the amount of air that enters the fire because otherwise it will burn too quickly whilst alight. From the ash pan it can be funnels via a tube to a bucket of water to cool it down. I have used this method many times and have always had plenty of charcoal. It’s a bit unconventional however is able to produce lots of useful heat and charcoal. Hope you find this idea useful, Best regards, Sam of the Violet Valley Railway.

I would put the motor at the wood chip end because it would be cooler. The charcoal exiting could drop into a sealed container that has copper pipes inside to help the charcoal cool before reaching the air. This cooling chamber would need a baffle to help with priming, but one it had its first batch the cool charcoal at the bottom would keep the new hot charcoal from reaching enough air.

It’s a very interesting almost ingenious design but I’m curious how you plan to stop creosote from gumming up the auger since creosote is extracted from the wood in the charcoal making process and can condense inside the auger or smokestack, also you could theoretically replace the bearings in the auger with metal shielded ones and connect the augers to the line drive which would eliminate the issues with what you already have with it and potentially make it viable to continue with the old design

I thought about a kon tiki like kiln with an auger on the bottom to scrape out the charcoal while it still burns on the top. The bottom needs to be under water to seal the kiln and to cool the charcoal and the auger.

awesome! im curious as to how you're going to realise this!

its a good idea but you will have issues with tar build up. pyrolytic reactions like this produce a lot of byproducts, such as methane, nitrogen monoxide, carbon monoxide and dioxide etc. powering the flame from wood gas is far more sensible and this kiln will produce copious amounts of it to feed the fire. in general you'd use around 40% of your wood gas powering the reaction. a vortex separator on the outflow will sort a lot the tar and gas problems out.wood tar is a commodity to be sold or fractionally distilled. use excess wood gas to heat your house etc

wonderful idea. I don't know charcoal is used for, though.

Good Luck ;)

I wonder, if you used saw dust to get charcoal powders. Then you cook rice, or some potatoes in water to make a starch glue if you could pour the charcoal powder in to get larger clumps. The saw dust would work better with the auger.

Some ideas You could use cement or brick as the insulation material and then run pipes with water through the insulation, and then use those hooked up with radiators to heat a building. You could also take the wood gas that comes off of the charcoal process and use it to power your locomotive for your railway I know in the 30s and 40s people would power their cars with wood gas stoves.