Re: Burning ethics

[AJH <andrew.heggie@dtn.ntl.com>]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:45:54 -0400, "Kevin Chisholm"
<kchishol@fox.nstn.ca> wrote:

>
>It is my understanding that anything in the Punlic Domain cannot be
>patented.

<snipped good appreciation of patents>

Well put Kevin, I think Crispin and yourself both voiced my
appreciation of the subject. It is as well to understand that
rewarding entrepreneurship is seen as a need to promote new technology
and hence growth of the winning business systems. It is a tool of
advanced cultures which may have internal mutual insurance but does
nothing for the great mass of humanity that have become also rans.
"Doing as you would be done by" does not sit well with "the devil
catches the hindmost".

>
>Similarily, if you said "I am working on a new process to make charcoal",
>and someone said "Why dont you consider using a high pressure process,
>because the Law of Mass Action clearly states that with high pressures,
>reactions will be driven in the direction of making the least quantity of
>gas products", this may jeopardize your patent application if you were
>proposing to use high pressures to reduce gas evolution. On the other hand,
>this is so obvious to one skilled in the trade, that the mere mention of it
>wqould be akin to "teaching ones Grandmother how to suck eggs."
>

I know that you used this as an illustration and have become used to
responses on "stoves" to be muted, whether because of the high lurker
to poster ratio or lack of useful input, but I am unfamiliar with the
Law of Mass Action. What I do relate to is that these conditions must
have occurred during the formation of anthracite. We are talking of
great pressure and high temperature (400C+). Under these conditions
water remains liquid and superheated. Water becomes a very strong
solvent in these conditions which is why I imagine these coals can
have high metal concentrations in them. I had considered this as a
means to remove heavy metal contamination from treated wood and
simultaneously make charcoal, the metals effectively being dissolved
in the cell water and products of the carbonisation. This water then
being vented and flashed off as steam leaving the metal compounds
behind.

Back to charcoal: put simply we have biomass which has been formed by
plant life grabbing water from the soil and CO2 from the air and, with
the aid of photons, synthesising this into sugar, thence to
poly-sugars, next to a combination of cellulose, hemicellulose and
lignins. During this process the oxygen stripped from the CO2 is
expired to the atmosphere.

In making charcoal from this biomass we heat it up. Tom Reed has
pointed out the amount of cooking it receives is analogous to
stripping off water molecules and leaving the C behind, a sort of
reverse of the process that formed it, ideally excluding the
atmospheric oxygen previously expired.

Mike Antal has announced a process that, by dint of application of the
techniques favouring conditions predicted by the law of mass action,
mentioned ny Kevin, maximises the retention of C to approach its
theoretical maximum (normally taken to be ~52% depending on biomass).
I pointed out that if *all* carbon remained as char then *no* carbon
would feature in the effluent which would be water.

We all know chemical reactions don't work like that but as
equilibriums of products.

Even so if we look at the energy balance it looks like with the 100%
fixed carbon yield, for an energy input of 19MJ/kg lhv daf biomass
that the resulting cold carbon only has 85% of the energy input.
Pointing to an exothermic process.
AJH

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