Cofiring biomass

One of my work projects is testing cofiring of small amounts of wood chips with coal in coal-fired power plants. The idea is that it's a way to reduce pollutants discharged to the atmosphere without requiring significant overhaul of an existing coal-fired power plant. Additional benefits include creating a market for Alaskan scrap wood that would otherwise be disposed of, and reducing carbon footprint.

Since this has been a rather publicized project, I'm taking the unusual step of revealing real names here.

I am working with a forester colleague, Dave Nicholls, who lives in Sitka. He, of course, is interested in finding markets for Alaskan wood products. We also have on board my very first grad student, one Zack Wright. He is a 4th-generation Alaskan and super bright, motivated, practical, and grounded. The three of us have been test firing small amounts of biomass at our local power plant in Fairbanks, where the power plant people have been extremely enthusiastic and accommodating. Not only did they give us access and support to do our testing in their plant, but they made sure to schedule it when their top-notch operations guy was on shift. That guy was amazing--he sat in his control room and stared at SCADA screens, pushing and pulling knobs and levers all through the burning to make sure that power output was constant. 5-15% aspen wood chips were added to a single burner's combustion stream. Among the parameters monitored were efficiency, firing rates, excess oxygen, NOx emissions, CO emissions, and smokestack opacity.

Here are the wood chips for the test burn. This pile here is 40 tons:


A bucket of coal! I am weighing samples to get bulk density. This photo was taken by my colleague Amanda Byrd.


And a bucket of pure biomass:


Here is a mixture of approximately 5% biomass by mass. This photo is another of Amanda's.


We had monitoring equipment on the roof. This photo also by Amanda. This is the power plant manager, Dave Fish, and Chad Schumacher of Superior Pellet Fuels, a local pellet and densified wood product manufacturer. Chad sold us the wood chips for testing at a greatly reduced cost. He has giant piles of scrap wood that he'd love to find a market for! I think Chad is a man a bit ahead of his time, always investing in products that Alaskans don't realize they need yet. I just hope they catch up to him so his business stays viable, as he deserves and we need!



One difficulty with biomass is the higher water content, especially when the wood is freshly cut and not given time to "season". Just to give you perspective, typically recommended drying times for logs to heat homes are 2 years in the Outside world, and at least one summer in Fairbanks (things dry fast here in summer since it is quite dry, and it remains warm at night). These chips could in theory dry very quickly, since they are tiny and allow a lot of air access. However, air doesn't flow very well to the interior of chip piles. Also, anything one does to artificially dry an energy product (such as heating) requires energy input, which of course somewhat negates the energy production of the biomass. It's quite a challenge when energy is so expensive!

So is it just me, or can you visually SEE how wet these chips are?




Coal mined in Interior Alaska is also unusually high in moisture (up to 30%, where in Pennsylvania it would be under 10%), so it does help reduce the contrast and mitigate that particular challenge of cofiring, although of course moisture during a combustion process will always eat up precious energy!

In other news, the girls are really cute when they snuggle on the couch:


And in other other news, I was visiting with our machinist today, and he showed me photos of himself as a young undergraduate art student, making the cross for the parish hall at St. Matthews Church! This must have been the mid 70's. Wow, how beautiful it was then! Those walls and that cross are all painted a drab brown now.

Brrrrr!!!

HAPPY SPRING, Y'ALL.

I guess it's spring-ish?

On Sunday, M came over to ski, and then we went to the Nenana Tripod Festival. The (four-legged?!?) tripod is put out onto the river ice, and tickets are sold to people who would like to guess the minute that the ice goes out each spring. It's Alaska's only legal lottery, and the jackpot is usually on the order of $300,000. Usually there are about 6 winners. Hmmm, $50,000, then the IRS takes a cut, and you have... not even enough to pay the balance of my mortgage! But I wouldn't complain if I won. :) It was windy on the river that day, so we didn't stick around for the full tripod raising. However, I have photos from past years here and here for your viewing pleasure.

Again, we caught the limbo contest:


St. Mark's Episcopal:


A gray, overcast day:


Only 3 lonely workers were out cutting the channel in the ice and assembling the tripod.






The ice is so clear!


The snow on the river was windblown:


When we got home, M's dog, Naya, had been waiting peacefully with my girls. For some reason, even though they hardly know each other, we could tell immediately that leaving them unattended would be no problem:


I always thought that Autumn was a very mellow, rather passive dog, but now that I've gotten to know so many others, I see that she actually has an edge to her that is unique among dogs who are as sweet on the surface as she is. Linden has it too, but Starbuck... not so much!

Look! It's the Amazing Boneless Dog!

Snow! Snow! Snow!

On Saturday morning, we woke up to several inches of fresh snow!


However, it was warm and wet and sticky, making skiing difficult. Nevertheless, we had fun. Check out Starbuckerooooooooooo!!!


And Autumn smiling:


Roo loooooooooves snow:








"I hear something!!"


My favorite landmark:


Booger is all back to normal, bouncing around!


DL being fuzzy:


The leaders conferring under a favorite tree:


Until Booger joins them. "Hey! Whatcha talking about? What? Cheeze? Bacon? Fuzzy? I'm fuzzy! Cheeze? Whooo? Rrrrrr?"


Every moment is a new adventure for Booger!


It was so warm that the snow spontaneously made a little snowball around Autumn's tags:


"Talk to da paw!"

Shoe hacks

So I have a confession. Despite my Carhartt-wearing, axe-swinging, log cabin lifestyle, I'm actually something of a shoe snob. My feet cover 40-50 miles a week, between leisure activities and bouncing around campus. I have no room in my life for shoes that hurt.

It's easy to find running shoes and hiking boots that fit my criteria because That is the Direction in Which Our World is Moving. Macy's is struggling and rebranding, while REI is opening new stores right and left. Dress shoes are more of a problem. The better dress shoes all tend to come with leather soles, and that means no traction. I finally found a solution while browsing through AIH. Tread tape!

You wipe down the sole with the degreaser of your choice (windex, plain isopropyl alcohol, hand sanitizer, vodka, etc), trim the tread tape to fit, and voilà! Traction better even than rubber compound!



Starbuck sez, "So now I can wear your nice dress shoes?"


I am certainly happy to be able to wear these beautiful boots year-round now!


P.S. This post is dedicated to JK, without whom I would definitely be a full-time lug-booted gal. JK keeps me feminine. :)

Single Life!

Now that DL is gone for the week, I can... um... I'm not sure what, exactly. I don't seem to do much that annoys him. He is very tolerant!

However, I do use him as a living teddy bear, so now Starbuck has to fulfill that duty:


Me: I luuuuuuuurve my Starbuckeroooooooo!
Starbuck: gggnnnmmmmnnnffffnnnggglllhhhhhhhh...

Weeeellll, one thing I do differently in his absence is eat very little meat. I like meat, but it takes some effort and extra dishwashing. Here is a typical Arvay-alone meal:


I boil some pasta, sautée veggies with garlic in olive oil, and medium-cook eggs at the same time. When the pasta is done, I toss it with the veggies and set the eggs on top. While the noodles are still hot, I break open the eggs, and the thickened-but-still-runny yolks make a sort of pasta sauce:


Since I knew DL was headed to Texas and restaurant food for a week, I loaded him up with veggies before he left:


Yum! I am very good at choosing avocados.

Since this post has become something of a dump of miscellaneous photos, please enjoy this one of Autumn and her giant bone:


And this one of candles glowing during our short power outage:

Weather whether we're ready or not

When we all left for the weekend, the weatherpeople were warning of another scary storm coming. "Scary" for Fairbanks doesn't mean cold, or snow. It means warmth, rain, and/or wind. All three of these things are very unusual and consequently very scary for us (because ice).

For once, the weather predictions were spot-on. It snowed lightly but steadily all day Saturday, for a total accumulation of under 3 inches, and then the snow stopped and the wind came that night. The wind blew all night, and we lost power. However, after the experience of having lost power for five days after the last windstorm, I had plenty of candles and a Coleman lantern on hand!

DL was due to fly to a work trip that night, and we were given the utterly frustrating experience of finding it impossible to reach a local person at the Fairbanks airport. All of the office numbers listed, led to literal offices, whose occupants had gone home at 5. All of the generic numbers to the airlines went to automated services, who informed us that the flight was "scheduled to depart" at the time it was scheduled for. I had planned to drive DL to the airport, but he told me to stay home instead; he'd drive in and leave his car at the airport. As it turned out, his flight *was* delayed, although only by a few hours, by which time the wind had died down. In the meantime, power was restored to our 'hood, and I was jolted from a light, fitful sleep by the Toyo and refrigerator whirring to life.

I'm impressed that the weatherpeople correctly predicted the timing and quantity of snow, and the exact timing and strength of the wind. The power company had linemen ready to deploy as soon as anyone lost power, and our power was restored within a few hours. DL's rescheduled flight took off almost as soon as the wind event was over, and he arrived safely in SeaTac. It's almost as if modern conveniences actually work! :)

As for me, I still had a restless night. I've disliked wind since I was a small girl, imagining the roof of our townhouse blowing off and our little family being sucked into the sky. Not being able to snuggle against DL didn't help, but toward morning, the surprisingly intuitive Linden came into the bed and snuggled against me, and I fell asleep immediately. When I finally got up this morning, I found myself blinking into a calm, clear blue sky and snow winking back at bright beams of sunshine. The girls and I enjoyed a peaceful ski on fresh snow, which had blown across the trails and covered weeks' accumulations of tracks. When I went to shovel the driveway, I found that the bottom layer of snow had packed into place, covering the ice from last weekend. Ice, sleepless angst, and windstorms are all now nothing but memories covered by forgiveness.