Wood Burning

I am interested in developing a design for a wood-fire steam turbine generator. Does the Steam Team have any helpful information of resources?

Inquiry by George.

Thanks for writing! Although most of us are not experts in the field of steam energy, we have put together a few things. You will also find that most of our ideas are based on the premise that supplies may be limited later on and that if a steam engine is built, it could be from whatever we can scrounge up. I don't think we have discussed much on turbines. Please, keep us informed and if you run across some good stuff, let us know. Maybe we could add it to our steam topic!

Offered by Clipper.

Graphic by Michel.

You might consider not using steam. Steam assumes that you need high levels of power immediately. However if you consider using the flow of the turbine to charge batteries then you don't have to worry about so great pressure and you can use a single where rather than many wheels to use of all the available energy from the steam.

So what you have developed is more like a hot water boiler, and an imitation river flow for a hydroelectric plant. If you can speed up the flow of the water substantially but not convert it to steam you will have a much more long lasting system without needing all the special high pressure protection , high temperature protections etc.

You can also use all the references for hydroelectric power, and you don't need to convert the wood to charcoal so you can develop enough BTUs. But to do this it runs on a long time basis, gradually charging batteries which are used as the primary source. You can also gang it with wind and sun, although we're all betting more on a long period of gloominess much like what happened to the Israelites during their 40 years wandering in the desert after the last shift.

Offered by Eric.