Brian H wrote: It occurs to me that starting up an FF generator in a remote location or carried on/powering a vehicle (distant from either other (operating) generators or the grid) will take some arranging. The capacitors have to be charged up to initiate the self-sustaining sequence, and that would have to be from either the grid, a small auxilliary generator, or batteries, I suppose. The capacitors couldn’t be counted on to hold charge for any useful period of time after a shutdown, either.

Is this likely to be much of a concern or problem?

For my idea of a DPF in a shipping container I’d decided on a small gas turbine generator, designed for neither quiet operation nor optimized for fuel efficiency… and it doesn’t have to charge the caps all at once.

500 kW at 800 amps are common ratings for a gear set sufficiently small (>1.6m3) to be folded into the container’s cooling system area, and the exhaust would be ducted up through the tower… but I wasn’t going to actually go there until I had sanity-checked some ideas I have for the basic cooling mechanisms in the tower.

But wherever the generator winds up just run it until the caps are charged and let the DPF rip…

An auxiliary idea I’d had, but not required, is to have the DPF container with the ability to draw power from its transport the same as a reefer container would. Enough to keep the caps partially charged up, but short of the point on their discharge curve where the caps start leaking excessively… even if the caps are nowhere near a full charge this would save charge-up time when the order to start the DPF is given.

Offworld operations would seem to require either solar panels or fuel cells.