Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
charmindustrial.com
charmindustrial.com
Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience.
Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn? This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle.
> But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly.
Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.
Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either prevent, or at least have enough self consciousness not to breathlessly talk about it in front of strangers.
I think what we miss consistently about the VC model is that we make the 10:1 ratio about chance and betting big, but I suspect the dominant force there is that 4 times out of 5, experience will save you from doing something expensively stupid. However once in a while it’s a clever generalist or someone who “doesn’t know any better” that uncovers a major advancement that the experienced people are blind to. So less than half of those failures are not thinking outside of the box, and most of the rest are not even knowing there was a box to begin with.
We tend to see this as an either or scenario. Throw a bunch of kids together or hire a bunch of cranky old men and women who say no all the time. That’s a false dichotomy. Hire some of both, don’t let the older ones steal all of the glory.
Some professions will readily say "imma keep my mouth shut because this is not my area of expertise" whereas every software engineer is a subject matter on everything up to and including open ended and subjective questions that humans have been trying to conclusively answer all of history. (The various types of mechanical engineers are nearly as bad.)
One could argue that the cultural problem is just a reflection of a demographics problem but I don't care enough about that aspect to make that argument.
As an aside, the failure in TFA doesn't sound that dramatic. Seems like the age old tale of a customer running material handling equipment at the edge of it's comfortable range and an tech needing to be flown out to tell them where to slap vibrators on it or what other minor change needed to be made in order to make it work better. Yeah, they probably should have seen this coming and shipped a more flexible solution or at least have had shovel ready options that didn't involve flying engineers out but whatever, it's a prototype and this stuff happens.
The upshot of this is that I seem to be able to avoid the Expert Beginner trap and get into more of an Expert Journeyman, which is somewhat more useful and less dangerous. I’m often deputized to take over things I don’t actually know all that well, because I’m seen as having some knack for playing twenty questions and then being able to improvise reasonably well without running back to the delegator every fifteen minutes, or setting the building on fire for fear of asking for clarification when it’s warranted.
I am also pretty mechanically inclined, took a lot of things apart and back together, including but not limited to bicycles I’ve subsequently taken above 40 mph (like cars, there are many kinds of defects that only show up at 2x “normal” speed, because forces tend to quadruple). Software people who know hardware of some sort are, at least in my experience, generally safer about trying to defy the laws of physics.
But the danger with model testing is that I often sound like I know exactly what I’m talking about when I don’t (and sound too similar when I actually am the expert, so people either trust me too much or not enough). I’ve played with various levels of wiggle words and uncertain phrasing to try to fix this, always with mixed results. Sometimes even stating it as an educated guess, based on X and Y, causes other people to agree that sounds perfectly correct even if it’s not (one of the original definitions of a meme). Sometimes I avoid that trap of not believing my own model in my head, even if I don’t let on, sometimes I don’t. I should probably have more care about others aping my demeanor, but I tend to mentor anyone who is comfortable asking clarifying questions. It’s the ones that want to fake it til they make it that I can’t help.
The danger is, as always, in believing your own PR. Questioning it constantly is paralyzing and exhausting, both for yourself and for observers (especially the exhausting part). Questioning it not at all is exquisitely dangerous.
They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour.
Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it creates cool new solutions to old problems, other times it spends 100x the money on problems solved 100 years ago (And does a worse job at it too)
The real reason self driving cars will ultimately fail is they’re being designed and tested in places like Palo Alto where it doesn’t even rain half the year and a pothole is a thing of legend from lands far away.
Public transport seems boring enough that no one talks about. Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains (and bike too) compared with cars? While we moved pass the faster horse era, we are now searching for better cars.
2) Even with self driving, there would be some efficiency gains from a bus, especially in places dense enough that there just isn't space for a car per person, like Manhattan. It would take adding something like 50 lanes of highway across the Hudson River to replace the capacity that trains currently provide for people to enter Manhattan from the mainland, IIRC. Neither electricity nor self driving in any way reduce the amount of space a car takes up. In fact self driving increases traffic by making it easier to go for a drive -- perhaps even send a car out for a 0 passenger cargo pickup trip.
Public transit is here to stay.
When it decided to make its manuever (on coming traffic briefly stopped to allow the car to drive around the double parked vehicle) the car made erratic micro turns and short hard braking action (pushing the nose of the car down) once it entered the (stopped) on coming traffic lane. The occupants were definitely thrashed around a bit.
The attempt was not pretty and definitely not even close to human level proficeny.
A typical manuever one has to make these days in the Bay with street parking eliminated in many busy restaurant / cafe corridors.
This doesn't even get into the enormous throughput efficiency that proper transit can deliver over longer distances.
Which almost every part of the county except SF (pretty much) has to deal with some combination of regularly.
In a dense urban environment? Sure maybe, as long as the sidewalks and streets aren’t packed.
Transit can be great, but most of it is so bad nobody sane would use it. Why would you risk waiting for a bus that only comes twice an hour when your car is sitting in your driveway waiting for you? Why would you take a bus when you can walk almost as fast?
Both of those are very real problems that most transit has, and most people just ignore it.
It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus. Sometimes it's cold outside and I'd have to walk half a mile to and from a bus stop. The local transit authority is experimenting with reducing the number of light rail cars so they'll be better covered by transit police in cars because violence is a problem. Once on BART I'm convinced somebody shit in a paper bag and left it in the middle of the car. Caltrain in rush hour would be a violation of the Geneva Convention if you made prisoners stand in such a cramped and unstable train for an hour at a time. I keep hearing about people getting stabbed by the local bus stop, 45 minutes after a friend visiting me came through the last time. A couple of months ago a dude died in the hospital after getting stabbed on a bus three blocks away from my apartment in a dispute over who got a cigarette left on the floor of the bus.
I calculated total cost of ownership of my car and it was considerably less than taking public transit unless I used public transit a lot, and any savings would be completely blown away by using Uber for just a couple of trips a month.
There are situations where public transit is a good thing, but it's generally a dirty, crime-infested, unpleasant experience in America only good for people who are really excited about not having a car. I'm opposed to any measures that force public transit on people by making car ownership more difficult until after they make public transit a safe, convenient, comfortable experience.
You’ll find this is typically the case in large cities that prioritise it appropriately - Between spending an hour in a car or on a train I’d choose the train every time.
That isn't a fundamental problem with buses, that is a problem with your local implementation.
A proper mass transit system gets to avoid all or most street traffic, including signaling and such.
Traveling through the streets of a city, you are lucky if your average speed hits 15mph. Mass transit can easily beat that if implemented well.
The problem is, until it hits that point it involves a LOT of planning and conforming to other peoples schedules.
Which for many people (parents, folks going to and from a lot of different places) can dramatically decrease their ability to actually exist or do what they normally do.
If it’s in an environment where cars suck to drive/park/etc. (dense urban environments), then it quickly goes to public transit.
But especially in the US, density is low, cars are easier than the alternative unless someone spends several trillions at least on some giant initiative (which they won’t). So for most of the (physical) US, public transit makes no sense.
There are areas on the border (SF Bay Area, a lot of outlying Seattle Metro, etc), and in those cases both options suck.
How much do you want to bet that the real story is that one of them drove past a grain elevator and wondered if they make a portable version of that equipment, or one of the frustrated/amused locals didn’t suggest it. Either directly or subconsciously. One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I don’t know if he’s giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like people who accidentally write a story/song they heard once.
I once suggested a product name in a meeting and everyone was like "eh" and then about five minutes later someone else (no, not a manager) suggested the exact same name to instant acclaim, and it was adopted. I don't think she did it on purpose, so I wasn't and am not mad about it, but it was odd.
If the room reads right I’ll occasionally do that as a joke, but I have heard too many stories of people who do it for real (one of the reasons I try to make it a joke).
I don't think it would be a fail if self driving cars were able to only operate in sunny locations with good roads. The caveat is that the outcome shouldn't just be a "magic" ML model that can't be modified to handle rain or potholes, it should be a set of tooling that allows you to make ML models that solve a variety of problems.
I'm not saying you need to teach your kid to swim by throwing them into the sea with weights tied around their ankles - you can ramp up to that... but you need to start exposing things to real world conditions pretty early on in development lest something, like a LIDAR censor close to the road surface in the front of the car, force you into a huge redesign when you discover that sheets of slush and road salt will liberally coat every front-facing surface of your vehicle driving in Boston in the winter.
They burned through several hundreds of millions in VC funding, even though a cursory look at their robots would show that they had no idea what they were doing. See for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...
For example: Fit and finish, organizing your production process so you are not forced to build $50k cars in a tent in the parking lot, following proven practices for service etc.
At the same time, teardowns of the cars are showing a lot of out of the box thinking that other incumbent automakers are not following. Things such as eliminating redundant systems with newer designs that can do multiple tasks, making parts modular enough such that you don't have to wait for a new model year to implement, the megacastings etc.
In the end, Tesla has only survived because they had enough capital to make these new ideas stick and now others are starting to have to copy his company's accomplishments. So maybe as long as you have enough capital, then it may be worth to "relearn" everything that everyone else has learned because it may lead to asking "why" on some of the old ways of doing things.
This process is like re-factoring old code but in real life.
They were involved already in the industry as a component supplier, and then expanded to take advantage of the incumbents moving slowly.
The trick is to find something they can fiddle with without ruining everyone else’s fun in the process. Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s a riddle.
From what the article describes later on, it appears the air pressure was actually generated by the tub grinder itself, not by any additional device.
So the appeal of the original design might have been that no active conveyance solutions was needed at all: Because the grinder's air exhaust stream - which you get "for free" - already provides enough pressure to move the material up the pipe, as long as the material is light enough.
That lets you greatly simplify the design, because now you can connect the grinder and the mill with a simple pipe and be done.
For me it makes sense that they used the simplest possible solution that worked for their previous use cases. When trying to use their system with corn, they probably wanted to give their previous approach a try, before taking the time and effort of modifying the system.
Edit: Got it wrong, both grinder and mill were creating the pressure. But the basic point is still correct I think. The choice was not air vs belt, it was "use the airflow that's there anyway" vs "build some active transport in addition to airflow".
At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and cracking, a similar process).
This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting products could have niche markets.
Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be a cool product.
Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest algae. You’ll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and sink carbon at same time.
Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
I don’t think you would ever get approval for something like this in a public lake. Maybe in some private, artificial pond?
And there are something like 14,000 lakes in MN though many of them one might be tempted to call ponds :) no need to build an artificial one though, there are plenty.
I guess the trouble was only what to do with the algae. They expected it leave the lake, bringing the excess nutrients with it. How would you harvest it?
The trouble is that distributing compost is extremely expensive and it doesn’t release into the soil quickly.
You can truck out tons of dry fertilizer and irrigate with it, getting immediate results through a system you already have on farms. Your nutrient to dollar ratio is far better (in the short term).
You might know this already. My main intent of mentioning that is that I suspect that way of thinking is actually totally misguided. The externalities seem to be far too severe, and damage to soils seems unsustainable as well. I have a feeling if we sucked up the cost of distribution and application of natural fertilizers, in the not-so-long term we might actually see major turn around on several issues related to crops and fertilizer run off.
There is plenty of evidence for it, but the scale of fertilizer needed is insane. No idea how we’d make that shift. Dry fertilizers are incredibly dense forms of nutrients, and they’re so easy to get from factory to plant.
US universities have published a lot of research showing natural fertilizers do yield good crops with better disease resistance, but any farm using them would need to put more money and time into fertilizing and could expect smaller yields. If everyone plays that game, okay… But if a farmer independently decides to, they need to find a market willing to pay more. That’s exceedingly rare.
We need to collectively value this investment, otherwise it’s very hard for farmers to afford the shift. At least, this is based on my limited hobby gardening/researching understanding. Someone in agriculture would know better.
After harvesting do something similar to the process in the post. Dry it, pyrolyze, separate carbon goo from ash, bury one, use the other as fertilizer or another useful purpose.
There is some nice hardware for achieving it.
I’d have to refuel about once a week.
Doing via CO2 bottle is the way I’d do it now and is how the impressive displays do it (for the ones I’ve seen).
Wolffia is the fastest growing plant on the planet and can double in size in a day. It's small, so it would work well as fuel for biomass reactors, the carbon char would be mostly derived from atmospheric carbon, resulting in a net negative, you can grow fish in the water underneath it, and it itself is edible and eaten already in many parts of the world where it grows naturally.
Further, it likes the slightly acidic water that bubbling CO2 into the water would create and it specifically oxygenates the water it floats in by stripping oxygen from CO2 during photosynthesis.
The downside is that no one has figured out the full process for continuously farming Wolffia yet, but if you solve that you can solve many other problems and create a multiple stream of income business out of taking carbon out of the air. (Biomass reactor fuel, plant food source for humans and animals, fish food source & selling carbon credits)
The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions.
> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1]
> Human activities emit over 30 billion tons of CO2 (9 billion tons of fossil carbon) per year [2]
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_captur...
Presumably it takes some amount of energy currently to run this process, so the "cost" of the carbon removal is energy usage currently. Would a BECCS process remove the need to use external energy altogether?
Capturing the heat from pyrolysis in this way does however convert the pyrolysis vapor from hydrocarbon into combustion byproducts, namely C02. This company claims to be condensing all of these hydrocarbons, not combusting them.
For a nice and understandable example of pure pyrolysis without combustion, there is this project [0] wherein an airtight vessel is loaded with biomass, heat/energy is applied with electrical resistive heating elements. The pyrolysis occurs and the resulting vapors are captured and stored as a low pressure vapor for later use in cooking or powering internal combustion engine.
In that case, you are totally correct, they'll need an input heat source.
-- How much mirror area [heat] would be needed?
-- Mirror geometry: Troughs may lend themselves to continuous processing and gas recovery a bit better than central point concentrators but they provide less heat potential.
-- Can the economics work if you only process when the sun shines?
My main concern is about whether you're sealing all the plant nutrients deep underground too, or are they separated out at some stage?
As a world, we're going to need to put all those nutrients back into the soil to be able to keep growing stuff. Particularly phosphorous has limited mineable stocks.
I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add product; this will end up generating more CO2 than it sequesters.
If you can't do it in place, you likely can't do it.
And even then, to actually sink carbon the correct thing to do would be to electrify the farm machinery for a much higher carbon ROI.
The stuff costs more in CO2 to drive to the place than you get from turning it into 'whatever'.
Extra trips over the field burn fuel, and something needs to pay for the dollar cost of that (in added fertilizer value or something) not to mention the net carbon emissions of burning diesel to go over the field again.
This approach removes carbon from the atmosphere permanently.
It's also (probably) a net energy producer and it doesn't require creating massive piles of decomposing plant matter everywhere.
Getting surface vegetation to deposit carbon in the soil long term is trickier. You aren't wrong, but it's also not as simple as some folks believe. Just cutting the corn stalks and cobs and leaving them on a field won't put much carbon back in the soil.
https://charmindustrial.com/faq?question=how-do-you-sustaina...
You also need to hire some farm kids or pay for some scholarships to get interns. Some of the problems you described solving over months would have been trivially solved by someone with farm experiences.
You’d really benefit from going to farm auctions, finding one of these, taking it apart, and adapting the mechanisms to your purposes. https://youtu.be/aYv8aDRv998
By contrast, our process retains the nutrients, improves the soil health relative to the baseline of just leaving it, and you get permanent carbon removal.
Yes, we're hiring for great mechanical engineers with experience in these areas ;) Lots to do!
Is there waste heat/syngas coming off the pyrolysis (beyond what's needed for sustaining it)? If so, have you looked into applying that to grain drying?
For soil health, I think you’d want your renter to go no-till (if isn’t already). And then for emissions, look into putting solar panels wherever, seeing whether there are electric/heat pump dryers available (???) if you have drying bins, and encouraging renter to use biodiesel.
Are there companies buying bio-oil yet? If I understand correctly, I like that you’re plugging into a larger system and applying engineering to make a piece of it more efficient. It’s always easier to get bigger than it is to get smaller!
Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?
Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon?
Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk bales, but you can’t take something OUT of a field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the soil to compensate.
Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more expensive.
Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers.
Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard
You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes.
What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place.
There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.
I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like:
1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this.
2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market.
3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person.
4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.
> Every ton of biomass contains roughly 1.65 tons CO₂.
On it's surface this is impossible. Does this refer to CO₂ equivalents like Methane? It seems that for carbon specifically, the process (pyrolysis, transportation, etc) emits more than one ton of carbon for every ton of oil sequestered.
Oxygen is a good bit heavier than carbon, to the point that about 80% of the mass of CO₂ is oxygen. Since burning fuel is generally about combining carbon and hydrogen in the fuel with atmospheric O₂, producing CO₂ and H₂O respectively, you can get numbers like these even before accounting for high-impact gases like methane.
Edit: and of course photosynthesis is essentially the same process in reverse, taking in CO₂ and energy, adding water for the hydrogen and removing some oxygen (that gets vented to the atmosphere) to get energy-rich biomass.
There is a small vent that you have to open at the front of the trailer BEFORE you raise it to dump out the contents.
Failure to do so leads to a vacuum effect that can implode the trailer as the biomass pours out
Source: friend of mine worked in the paper industry and this was a somewhat regular occurence
Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000 units."
An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static cling!
This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work.
At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.
And yeah, it's absolutely a shame. I would similarly love to hear about more big engineering issues and subsequent solutions, even if they're fairly dumb issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
?
https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap....
Is there a "mechanical engineering for dummies" educational path (Book? Software? Kit?) that would equip someone for doing like 90% of the mechanical design&prototyping work?
Interesting point: "when you solve one bottleneck you find a new one somewhere else."
Fluid flow/ thermo would be the other main academic area that this book wouldn't cover.
There's a bunch more topics though that you build over years of intuition- manufacturability, design tradeoffs, etc.
There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold from it. Magic? I don't think so.
So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn?
You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not all nice, uniform and spherical?
I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't complain. Just focus on solving it.
Farmers are often masters of mechanical improvisation because they have very narrow windows in which they can plant or harvest so breakdowns have to be fixed or worked around in just hours or at most a few days.
You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.
That and it would do nothing to remove CO2 or Methane from the atmosphere, so even the process of getting the oil to bury would be carbon positive in the first place.
Ok, it’s a great article for other reasons too.
This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?
It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down.
So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.
To be honest, to me it sounds like a dream job.
This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.
Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.
I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.
“I believe he did, Bob.”
What do you think the article was about?
Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but this article is receiving a lot of them along these lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not predict everything that could possibly go wrong before you started this new tech project?"
I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to identify every problem before field testing. Even in commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even though we have had factories for about 250 years.
When they start testing in a different state or country, they will discover a new crop that breaks their system and will go though this process once again. But now, they are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.
Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?
It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.
https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iow... https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid
We delivered 90% of permanent carbon removals globally last year: https://twitter.com/charmindustrial/status/14511691760646430...
I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop.
Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely.
Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product...
Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.
What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
I never gave much thought to this kind of thing.