Outside the box: Required auxiliary gear for FF DPFs

[Aeronaut]

good catch, Zap. I’d keyed on the picture without reading the description. Unlike a generator, FF scales output by varying the pulse frequency. This means the cooling system is most likely to physically scale with output. The neat thing about semi-trailers is the ground clearance is over a meter, and they have lots of surface area to spread radiators over.

A variation of this topic might be how inherently road-worthy is a design? Iow, do we need an over-width permit? A house-moving permit? Special routes to avoid bridges? How does this work on flatbed railroad cars, etc.

[zapkitty]

Aeronaut wrote: good catch, Zap. I’d keyed on the picture without reading the description. Unlike a generator, FF scales output by varying the pulse frequency. This means the cooling system is most likely to physically scale with output. The neat thing about semi-trailers is the ground clearance is over a meter, and they have lots of surface area to spread radiators over.

Nitpick: a shipping container is not a semi-trailer, although a lot of semis on the roads are actually specialized flatbeds hauling shipping containers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_shipping_container

And that pretty much prohibits anything being done through the floor of the container.

But nothing like that should be needed anyway…

Aeronaut wrote: A variation of this topic might be how inherently road-worthy is a design? Iow, do we need an over-width permit? A house-moving permit? Special routes to avoid bridges? How does this work on flatbed railroad cars, etc.

It would be like any other shipping container on the roads (or on the rails or on ships at sea)… no special measures are needed if you build to standard container specs.

Given my predilection (fetish? 🙂 )for more-than-ample margins while designing, the container I have in mind is a standard double-length hi-cube…

Exterior Dimensions
length 40′ 0″ 12.190 m
width 8′ 0″ 2.438 m
height 9′ 6″ 2.896 m

Interior Dimensions
length 39′ 4″ 12.000 m
width 7′ 7″ 2.311 m
height 8′ 9″ 2.650 m

The standard containers are tough, durable and stackable.

If the container is custom-built for the job then there should be no problems fitting in all the stuff a portable DPF would need… and you have the option of just leaving it sitting at the site if that seems indicated.

My first vague impression for a 2MWe portable DPF is that half the container’s length should be reserved for cooling at the moment… that could mean that the DPF actually runs at 2.5-2.7 MWe with the excess devoted to cooling… a transformer block of about 2m x 2m x 2.5m is reserved for the moment… with 10cm margins all over the place that still leaves about 3 cubic meters for the vacuum pumps, fuel gear and whatever else I forgot… and that still doesn’t count the volumes above and below the DPF box…

(the volumes to the sides of might be reserved for the box supports and perhaps rails for the box to slide out on when it needs maintenance?)

Now I’ve provided some simple 3d renderings to illustrate the point for those who can see past the end of their noses (half the time I can’t even see that far)… and, well, people have a habit of overinterpreting these simple visual estimations as if they were detailed schematics or something. I blame Foundation Imaging 🙂

Please let’s not go there again. It’s depressing. Read what I actually wrote above before trying to interpret the images below.

Green is the cooling tower
Black indicates the intakes along the sides
Yellow indicates the exhaust fans on top of the tower
Blue indicates the transformer block
Gold indicates the volume for the vacuum pumps et al
Orange is the DPF box

renderings are:
01 – Undeployed
02 – Deployed
03 – Side view

… and again these are preliminary estimations for a 2MWe output setup… The cooling may be overdone… the transformer block may be undersized… the hamsters may be on strike… whatever… 😉

Attached files

[Aeronaut]

Outstanding work, Zap! :coolsmile:

My last gig was unloading shipping containers, so I know precisely how short and heavily framed they are, lol. They also come in 53 foot lengths, btw. For my purposes, a 53 foot FF generator trailer beats a shipping container for domestic markets for many reasons:

1. The components will ship to a job site on a flatbed to make them easily accessible to the end user’s crane(s) for fixed installations.
2. Much less (and lighter gauge) steel is used in the package- the weight can go towards water for the cooling system in remote/ emergency response applications.
3. Traveling roadshow demonstrations. Creative types can have a lot of fun imagining how to deploy x number of these trucks to power their city or village for free for a day. Google did a similar type of promotion recently to pick the city where they’d install a wi-fi network.
4. The system designer isn’t limited by the tube steel frame required for stacking, so some or all of the sides can either fold out or extend like on an RV when the system’s running. Now your side clearances are much wider and access to plumbing and wiring skyrockets.

The shipping container is made to order for international markets, if they emerge. Personally, the only international markets I see for any of the early manufacturers are countries that need lots of help with clean water and drainage even before electricity. Pro-bono work, which is designed into my plan.

[Henning]

Aeronaut wrote: The shipping container is made to order for international markets, if they emerge. Personally, the only international markets I see for any of the early manufacturers are countries that need lots of help with clean water and drainage even before electricity. Pro-bono work, which is designed into my plan.

???

Where’s that market that doesn’t want a FF generator?

BTW: The largest market of GE’s 2 MW gas turbines in shipping containers is Pakistan (even before the flooding), because there the grid is so bad, that companies and communities want backup systems to provide their energy needs without much outage.

[Aeronaut]

Henning wrote:

The shipping container is made to order for international markets, if they emerge. Personally, the only international markets I see for any of the early manufacturers are countries that need lots of help with clean water and drainage even before electricity. Pro-bono work, which is designed into my plan.

???

Where’s that market that doesn’t want a FF generator?

BTW: The largest market of GE’s 2 MW gas turbines in shipping containers is Pakistan (even before the flooding), because there the grid is so bad, that companies and communities want backup systems to provide their energy needs without much outage.

I agree with Brian’s stampede theory once somebody goes into production. That means that every country on the planet is going to be producing FFs, effectively eliminating international markets within the first year of mass production. All it takes if I’m correct is somebody to break the ice.

[Tulse]

Aeronaut wrote: every country on the planet is going to be producing FFs, effectively eliminating international markets within the first year of mass production.

Exactly — once it’s demonstrated, it will spread like wildfire. Of course Dr. Lerner and crew’s research is not at all easy to do, and working out the specific details of making FF function is difficult. But it looks like, with the appropriate specifications, the actual final device will be something one could make in a well-equipped machine shop. There is no way this tech isn’t going to find its way into every corner of the globe.

[zapkitty]

edit… quote from Aeronaut got et… was about perceived limitations of containers

errr… errrrr… 🙂 as to what can be done with containers… well, very little of what you claimed for the flatbed cannot be done for a current custom container.

Nowadays just about anything can be and is done with them… imagine a 40′ hi-cube with eight (8) roll-up doors along each side. That’s just a random example off the net.

So flexibility would seem to not be an issue with containers, and their strength, durability and cross-platform transport capability would be a huge plus.

And the point of the execise remains..: to attempt to determine what auxiliary equipment is actually needed for a DPF to operate independently. Thus the portable auxiliary and emergency power setup with the additional ability to be an initial or replacement power utility.

So onwards… 🙂

[zapkitty]

Given that the competing units are gas turbines with very hot exhausts I see no problem with upping the tower exhaust temperature to about 150 degrees C or higher… still short of igniting stray leaves blowing by :)… and enabling us to drop the extra power required for cooling by quite a bit.

Thoughts?

[Aeronaut]

zapkitty wrote: Given that the competing units are gas turbines with very hot exhausts I see no problem with upping the tower exhaust temperature to about 150 degrees C or higher… still short of igniting stray leaves blowing by :)… and enabling us to drop the extra power required for cooling by quite a bit.

Thoughts?

The turbine’s trailer makes a very handy set of target specs to compete against. I’m all for raising the exhaust temperature to slightly less than what the market’s proven to be acceptable risks. No matter how safely we design and build FFs, we will never be able to please all of the people all of the time.

[vansig]

Henning wrote:
BTW: The largest market of GE’s 2 MW gas turbines in shipping containers is Pakistan (even before the flooding), because there the grid is so bad, that companies and communities want backup systems to provide their energy needs without much outage.

Nigeria could use a few, right away. Seems their electrical grid was mentioned on BBC world news, just yesterday

[Author]

Posts