I have been reading about biomass power, in particular doing research on whether a pelletizer and hammer mill is really needed and maybe a more sensible approach.

Because if you think about it is a lot of equipment, these things are quite expensive even after cost reduction through open source methodology. And ultimately the fuel does not fundamentally need to be transformed in this way.

So I have been looking hard at what exactly the benefits and drawbacks of these things are. Basically the benefits are commoditization and interfacing with the industrial approach taken for oil and other fuels, in a nutshell. Compaction, free flowing material that has a lower surface area to volume ratio and is therefore less of a fire hazard. Standardization is another big one, pellets are pellets so the mechanisms for material handling etc can work the same for the various sources.

The downsides are serious though, you need to use a binder material, and as I said the machinery is expensive, but it also is another labor requiring processing step. It makes sense in an industrial top-down context when you can have the machines running 24/7 and ship the biomass out of there real fast. A small pellet mill that ran continuously converting the bounty of a certain area might be interesting as it could take advantage of this maximal use of the equipment, but then you need the dedicated power source etc.
It also requires a binder, usually wax although I'm sure there are plenty others and there may be some that could be produced from wood or grown or something, it is a relatively ungainly and wasteful process.

If the biomass is to be sold on the open market it might be necessary to do pelletizing.

But if it is just used on the farm it seems very silly all things considered. One of the posts on the blog said something about a car with a build in pelletizer and hammer mill, so it could make it's own pellets on the go. This would not make any sense at all.

In this context you don't need it to be particularly dense, though you still need safety and handleability. Suppose you instead used fungus as a binder, I remember hearing about a company making styrofoam substitute by mixing in a fungus to waste biomass or something. A much lower performing fungus would be adequate here to knit the biomass together.

So if instead a lawn mower type thing could be used to mow the switchgrass, then spit it into a hopper on the or towed by the lifetrack, in the process mixing in fungal innoculant (perhaps just by tossing some existing biomass pellets into the hopper, maybe they'd need a little grinding up, I don't know if it would be a good idea to let the fungus escape onto the field in large amounts or it could be dropped directly on the mower blades) that seems like a much more sensible approach. It could then be pressed into small dice-size cakes or extruded if that is easier or something. Or maybe the whole load of clippings could be dumped on the ground, the fungus knits it together and then you use a device with blades to cut it into pieces and deposit in an adjacent pile where it can dry out.

You could also reuse the CEB press to press biomass bricks as insulation or fuel bricks (for sale) or something maybe... hm, I wonder if that styrofoam replacement stuff is any good as insulation? If not another fungus might be... just blow the biomass in the wall and let the fungus work.


Ideally you would just let the biomass dry on the field then grind it up with another mowing, blowing it into the hopper and that's it. Research needed to determine safety of such a fuel though, I imagine a hopper of it could go up in flames pretty fast. Maybe if it was ground small enough the voids would be too small, and like a pile of sawdust it would not be a problem.