Chris Franklin, Chairman at Ranheat Engineering Ltd, a leading UK manufacturer of wood combustion equipment, continues his series of articles exclusively for Furniture and Joinery Production. This month, he writes about how you can use your boiler system during the summer to make savings with the spiralling costs of wood-waste disposal; this is particularly true for fine MDF dust.
With this in mind the only certain option is to use it on site and burn the dust and other extracted material on-site and use it to heat the factory or process heating. This ties in nicely with the change to water-based finishes that require energy to dry the product even in the summer.
So even if you don’t have a summer process load for drying paint lines or spray booths there are other uses.
The Organic Rankine Cycle or ORC. So, what is this? In the simplest of terms, it’s a process that turns hot water into electricity. The problem with the ORC is “thermal inertia” again in simple terms, the boiler needs a large water content. All Ranheat boilers have a large water content. An accumulator is not a substitute for a large water content boiler When an ORC generator puts load on a boiler an instant reaction is needed. Boilers with a small water content simply get “flattened” and won’t cope with the demand put on them.
Evaporation cooling for air conditioning. The simplest way to describe this is it is like a gas-powered refrigerator in a towable caravan.
We a know that when you compress a gas we generate heat (think of your hand-held bicycle pump getting hot as you pumped your tyres up) Equally well when you expand a gas you get cooling. Evaporation cooling uses the same principle.
The Sterling engine. Still used on lake Windermere, a wood fired hot air engine to propel a boat (or an electrical generator) uses the principle of heat expanding and cooling contracting this uses the cool water from the lake to cool the hot wood gases and a crankshaft turns this into a rotary motion.
Conventional fuels, oil, gas and electricity can only really go up in price in real terms.
A typical Ranheat warm air system with 150 kW output has the ability to dispose of 5-6 tonnes of material per week and heat a process drying facility and heat a factory of up to 10,000 ft2.
Yes, a permit is needed but at the moment this only requires an exemption (done online and at no cost) to burn waste from an industrial process. Yes, planning for the chimney and chimney height approval would still be needed. If you process more than 1,000 m3 of wood-based products MDF etc. in a year, then you still need a separate permit for this even if you don’t have a wood-burner.
The systems have been tested and are eligible for inclusion into Smoke Control areas as Exempt appliances.
For further information on all types and sizes of Industrial Woodburning equipment from 75 kW upwards contact Ranheat on 01604 750005 [email protected] www.ranheat.com Ranheat also make spares and service and repair other makes of woodburning boilers and heaters.
