hey folks,

so i've made a babbington, building it into a broken kerosene torpedo heater. i'm using the classic doorknob with a #76 hole, and blending 50% kero with 50% WVO. i'm using a refrigerator compressor for the air.

i'm having two problems:

first, the mist drops to the bottom of the combustion chamber , condenses, and then there's a pool of fuel down there, which i don't like for obvious reasons. i'm wondering if this is because i don't have enough air pressure.

second, i'm not getting the best burn i could. adding a fan in the back helps, but not much. do others use fans? i'm wondering if my combustion chamber (a 6" diameter 12" long duct that was in the torpedo heater to begin with) is too big. i'd like to hear what others use for combustion chambers, as it'd give me some good ideas. when i put the cap in, (the part of the torpedo heater that usually keeps the flame from shooting out the front) the burn is better, but the puddling is still an issue, and it's worse than if i don't use the cap. it's also very smoky, indicating poor combustion.

will i ever be able to use this like a typical torpedo heater, or will it have to be flued?

any and all help is appreciated.

found the solution to my problems, and i've written a digest on my initial designs. you can view it here:

http://www.frybrid.com/forum/showthread.php?p=45341#post45341

nick

What are you doing for a heat exchanger?

For Air? For Water?

Hot water is the grand prize..

nickydubs -- I read through the link you posted in the "found the solution" post. Was the fix the change to the 5 inch diameter X 2 ft long combustion chamber ?

I am a bit surprised that going to even a SMALLER diameter combustion chamber was the fix, I had suspected that even the original 6 inch diameter combustion chamber may have been too small in diameter. the extra foot in length was likely the largest improvement as I assume that now the entire length of the flame is contained inside the combustion chamber with it being 2 ft long.

the flame shape depends on a combination of everything else including air pressure, ball hole size, oil type,thickness and preheat, combustion chamber additional air feed hole size and placement, number of holes etc, tons of variables. You don't want any part of the flame touching anything including the combustion chamber wall or the far end of the chamber as it instantly quenches the flame and produces soot from the remaining unburnt fuel.

quote:

Originally posted by Tim c cook:
You don't want any part of the flame touching anything including the combustion chamber wall or the far end of the chamber as it instantly quenches the flame and produces soot from the remaining unburnt fuel.

HUH ????

I use a deflector plate on mine.. It turns bright red hot and helps to re-burn fuel that escapes.. The deflector plate is placed at the very last couple inches of the flame..

But mine fires up a 4 inch tube! The first 50% of my flame is restricted in size by a 4 inch "fire tube".. This has air being pumped in from the sides. Once the flame leaves the tube, it doesnt contact anything until the very tip where I put a deflector plate to deflect the heat around the plate and to the side-walls.



Perhaps this only applies to the horizontal burn?

everything I have read says "don't let the flame contact the chamber" as the flame will be cooled below burn temp and produce considerably more soot and smoke, It may be that this statement is refering to only the refractory lining inside commercial combustion chambers and does not apply to a red-hot steel plate ? This would be a nice distinction to know.

In your 4 inch tube, since it is emitting air through holes I would expect the tube to be considerably cooler than the red-hot deflector plate, I suspect it is quenching the flame where the flame contacts it, this is reducing efficiency as it is not allowing the volitilized fuel to completely burn in this area, I would expect to see some soot on the inside of the cooler section of the chamber pipe, 4 inches is pretty small for any oil flame shape that I have played with so far.

looking inside of the 4 inch chamber should reveal a visual indication of where it is too cool, I would expect the area below or behind the base of the flame to be clean, soot starting around the cool air inlet holes and moving forward to some point until the pipe got hot enough to not quench the fuel, from there on forward it should be clean with a bit of hard ash flakes and maybe some pitting due to high-temp erosion.

All info I have read concerning converting an original fuel oil burner furnace to run on heavier oils caution that the original combustion chamber will likely be too short in length for complete combustion as the flame from heavy oil is always considerably longer in length than a light oil flame, this will allow the end of the heavy oil flame to contact the far end of the combustion chamber, many posts I have read indicate this to be true as the poster indicates that the back of there burn chamber gets coated with soot after a heavy oil modification. It seems that allowing the flame to contact the refractory cement also causes an large increase in the erosion rate of the refractory cement. Fairly easy to fix by either changing to a shorter air tube on the fuel-oil burner or by remounting the entire burner back out of the combustion chamber a few inches.

Ok Tim... That's some interesting information that makes perfect sense.

I'm going to do a few experiments.. Perhaps my design is flawed??? My design is flawed??? Flawed?? Oh no........ This is going to lead me to start drinking...

One thing I do know for sure, the 4 inch burner tube that contains the first 40 to 50% of the flame is as clean as the day I put it in.

So far my info is all from reading the experiance of others rather than my own experiance as I am just now getting a burner up and running. It is good to hear that a smaller diameter fire tube will work just fine, good to know.

Tim,
I was just thinking about something interesting.. When I see photos of these turk burners and others, I see bright orange flames the entire length of the burn.. But, my flame is blue for the first 3 to 5 inches before it turns yellow..

Could that have something to do with it?

You have a better balanced hotter flame like a brazing torch when you turn the air on.

Yellow flames are sooty.
Blue flames are not.

Ideally you should have a blue flame all the way.

If you get all the variables just right.

Not sure it is possible with an atomised liquid fuel rather than a gas but it might be.

Don't know why not.

Blue flame with oil -- all of the pictures I have seen of the flames from oil burners, even forced air furnace burners, are a yellow flame. I think this means somewhat incomplete combustion, On my own testing of an old syphon-type low pressure oil furnace burner I see just a tiny amount of smoke from its yellow flame even burning diesel.

The only home-built oil burner that I have read about that claims to burn with a purely blue flame is on the Tesla-turbin website. It is based on the design of a camp stove burner where the fuel is passed through a "vaporizer", this is a tube or pipe that is actually coiled-in or passes-through the flame and boils the liquid fuel into a vapor before it is fed to the burner head. this probably does produce a cleaner flame but at the big tradeoff of leaving all the crud and tar and carbon inside the vaporizer. I just had this happen in a single burner camp stove even though I was burning E85 as fuel. It took about 3 months of burning about 1 hr/day to clog up the vaporizer but I worked most of an evening trying to clear it, no luck, I now know why they sell replacement vaporizers.

I have also run across a website about heavy-oil cooking burners for 3rd world use, they use the same princapal but there latest unexplained design claims to have reduced the clogging. The main page for plant oil stoves is here. This web page was last updated in 2003 and most of the links are dead so must not be a lot of interest any more - unfortunate.

All of these type burners need to be started or at least pre-heated with a volital liquid like alcohol or kerosine and are not self or auto starting so need to burn continuously.

Murphy -- Interesting -- The yellow portion of the flame probably contains unvaporized liquid fuel. since the flame was blue to start with (all vapor/air) it would seem reasonable to suspect that the fuel vapor in the flame is cooling and condensing back to liquid farther out (or you are somehow not getting enough air to this part of the flame).
I think this is where the design of the combustion chamber comes in to play, if the chamber holds and radiates enough heat back into the flame everything stays as vapor. I suspect the chamber design is mostly a black art rather than a science, probably LOTS of trial-and-error involved. Startup will always produce some yellow flame and smoke until the combustion chamber comes up to heat. this is unfortunate for furnace burners that start/stop with a thermostat as the chamber cools off every shutdown. When I pulled my old low pressure burner out of its combustion chamber there was about 6 inches of baked carbon/oil crud (oily dust-rubbery type stuff) all around the air tube due to these less-than-clean startups on a cold combustion chamber. Cleaning out this crap is one of the reasons they recommend having your furnace serviced every year.

Now here is where I start to fall short on knowledge in this area.. (seriously short). I thought I read somewhere that a blue flame was an indication of carbon monoxide production. Not sure where I read that or if the information is accurate or not.. But this leads me to some other questions.
1. Why is it that you will get carbon monoxide poisoning from a natural gas exhaust but not from kerosene?
2. Does WVO produce enough carbon monoxide to poison you if not exhausted properly?
3. Would ethanol poison you also?

Anyhow, you got one thing right for sure Tim... Design of the burn chamber is more of an art than science. You have no idea, and I'm embarrassed to admit how many designs I have tested.. While they all create fire, its not always a pretty sight. I've experimented with some very radical designs.. No math involved here.. Just design by gut feeling.. The real problem is that I want my burner to burn anything.. WVO, WMO, Hydraulic Oil, Tallow, Fuel Oil, BioDiesel, etc etc.. The funny thing is, fuel oil and biodiesel seem to burn in almost any design and burn just fine. WMO is the next easiest but WVO and Tallow are a whole different challenge.. Remember what I said in another post of mine.. "It must be maintenance free".. If I get this thing right, perhaps I'm looking at a patent? hahaha.. ya right..

A burner that will handle that veriation of fuel cleanly sounds like a VERY tall order as each fuel has it's own vaporizing chericteristics and also needs the appropriate amount of air and mixing to burn cleanly, hard to expect this from one design that does not have verious tweeks for each type fuel - Good Luck.

You could definatly patent it but all that gets you is the right to bring lawsuits against anyone manufacturing an almost identical design, patents no longer (never did realy) cover the "concept" but only the specifics (you have to anticipate and describe all the verious future possable veriations of the item in the patent aplication, this makes a lot of paperwork to be generated, reviewed, discussed. the patent office will likely disallow many of these claims based on there review of existing patents (could take years) but you have to cover the cost of there review time, big patents are VERY expensive) so unless there is absolutely only one way it can be done a patent is mostly, in my opinion, only a benifit to the layers. It has been my experiance that a large company won't bother building a product anyway unless it has a BIG potential with a sales volume big enough to cover the business cost plus a good profit so if it is a "niche" product you are pretty safe without the patent ("niche" can be up to 1/2 a million units/year, depends on the customer base, product cost and sales life expectancy).

It may be worth the cost (min of about $2000.00 for a realy simple patent) if you intend to actually crank up a real business (bankers,lawyers, commercial property, employees, etc) or licence the design, I dought you will like paying your lawyers without a banker backing you.

Carbon monoxide -- this is going to sound odd -- but I recently realized that the main fuel in ALL carbon based flame is actually carbon monoxide, this is actually what is burning, heating carbon in the presence of oxygen (air) til it transformes into carbon DIoxide (rapid oxydation of carbon, releasing heat as part of the reaction) is the basic description of fire. It is when any burner does not burn (transform) ALL this carbon monoxide into dioxide that there can be a problen as the carbon monoxide can escape into your house and become a concern (don't think it is actually a poisen but it replaces the oxygen in the air you breath and causes suffocation, I could be wrong here).
Propane and natural gas are quite pure and easily converted to basicly only carbon monoxide/dioxide so if it is not all burnt you don't have any smoke or smell to alert you of it's presence like a yellow-flame fire would more likely do.

Damn Tim,
You're just a library of knowledge!!

So, as I understand it, carbon monoxide posioning from a natural gas furnace is so dangerous because there is no warning smell.. Where as the same would not be true for waste oils because the smell will permeate the area and alert the occupants..???

This is good stuff to know.

quote:

A burner that will handle that veriation of fuel cleanly sounds like a VERY tall order as each fuel has it's own vaporizing chericteristics and also needs the appropriate amount of air and mixing to burn cleanly, hard to expect this from one design that does not have verious tweeks for each type fuel - Good Luck.

Maybe he can apply "Murphy's Law" to make it work? Ok just a joke don't take it seriously.

HOPEFULLY the smell and/or smoke will wake somebody up. Unfortunatly, every fall around here it is not unusual to hear of a couple of entire families being lost even when using other heaters like wick-type kerosine heaters or whatever.
Carbon monoxide is realy sneaky in that the human body does not notice or react to it so you simply slowly smother for lack of oxygen in your system. Carbon Dioxide will produce a definite reaction when inhaled, it gets you attention instantly, at least while you are awake, I don't know how it would be if a person is asleep. - don,t know why adding one more oxygen molecule makes such a differance ?

Hi All,
Just a few things -
1 - If your familier with the old Optimus camping stoves you'll know that this kind of burner works best with a defuser plate about have way up the max flame at temp. It heats up to red/orange hot and helps complete the burning process as it is not big enough to dissapate to much heat.

2 - A blue flame indicates a complete burn = co2 / a yellow flame still has unburnt carbon and produces co. Co is a poison - co2 just sufficates you.

3 - The smaller the burner tube the less fuel it takes to acheive operating temp but it also restricts the total BTU output.

4 - If you want to be able use differant fuels and controle the output of your burner just use a threaded collar and cut some slots in the bottom side of the tube to create a veriable draft.
I've got an old fireplace insert that I want to modify to use as a sorce of heat in my home without the fireplace and this thread gave me the idea of using WVO to fire it. Thanks !

Nothing like a cold draft up your arse to make you love a modern heater

Vaporizing the Intake air for complete combustion is the best and safest way to acieve your goals. Honeywell has flame detectors and operating controls for Blue Flame operation they are way more expensive than the yellow or Flame retention head tech of most oil burners since circa 1978. They also Honeywell have an in line electric oil burner HEATER that they say can be used with 110 volts.

See my web page for the latest tech for Blue Flame tech. HED also has an industrial oil blue flame that I have re patented with many modifications. The Honeywell controls on a blue flame vaporizing burner with the oil line heater would run you $700 about. with the Carlin oil burner using their Honeywell in line oil electric heater and my vaporizing kit with the Honeywell safe gaurds would run you total over $2,000. PRE-HEATING THE COMBUSTION AIR IS THE BEST WAY OUT. Jeffrey Barrett, Aurora Clean Energy Co.

so it was working great with the 5"x24" duct, but i decided to replace that with some stainless steel, which sounded like a good idea. the new combustion chamber is 7"x20", made out of a fire extinguisher. it's got 14 3/8" holes drilled to let air in 3" down the tube, along with the 3" wide hole the jet fires into.

i also added a regulator to my compressed air. the refrigerator compressor was shooting out 60 PSI, and i've hooked up my shop air compressor in place of it. i've found that it could run as low as 30 PSI, and as high as 80, with varying

the problem is that with the new combustion chamber it won't stay lit. i have no clue why. i'm also running a 1:3 kero:WVO blend, because that's what worked best in the 5" tube. it still seems to be the best blend, i tried a few. when it does stay lit, if you can call it that, it just backfires and fires alternately, every 5 seconds or so.

any suggestions? even descriptions of anyone elses combustion chambers would be great.

Some things I think could cause that.. You decide.
1. Unstable oil flow
2. Inadequate atomization
3. Lack of combustion oxygen
4. Severly high water levels.

Pulsating flow into the atomization air will cause intermitent firing.

Inadequate atomization is probably not the problem unless your feeding it freezing cold fuel..

Lack of combustion oxygen is by far the most likely cause.. This would explain the pulsating.. Try removing or cutting out part of the air diffuser in the front of the topedo heater.. Let more air through..