Interesting week

Steve Ebels_3

I spent Monday through Wednesday last week at this place http://www.mtu.edu/forest/fordcenter/
doing testing, startup, commissioning and some trouble shooting for Michigan Tech University and the personnel at this location. Actually, my first visit was about a year ago to do some initial evaluation of the project. There were some changes that had to be made to the piping and I detailed them in a report I wrote for the school at that time. I was invited back to see if things were done properly over this summer. There's still a few things to address there but that not the purpose of my post.

They had received a grant to install wood fired boilers in their maintenance building and the dorm/conference center building and the boilers and piping had been installed per engineer specs. The engineering firm drew everything out in detail and spec'd all the misc equipment in the system. They included BTU/flow meters, mixing valves to maintain a specific temperature in the supply water, sized the expansion tanks and the thermal storage tanks for each boiler but neglected to read through the installation guidelines from Econoburn apparently. There were a few things either overlooked or omitted and some basic hydronic piping principles were ignored.
I do like the premise of the grant though. It's purpose is to measure as close as possible actual system efficiency of a modern wood fired gasification system.

The history of this place is fascinating and I thought some pictures of the old steam power system in the sawmill might tickle some fellow Wetheads here.
Henry Ford, it turns out was a social visionary as well and the inventor of modern mass production. He established several villages like this which were all designed to be self sufficient from the output of their goods and the produce of the land. This one basically didn't work because of the short growing season in that corner of Upper Michigan.
The sawmill ran until 1981 and I had the pleasure of spending my time there with the last guy to operate the head saw. He's now head of maintenance at that campus.



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Solid_Fuel_Man

Wow, looks like a locomotive boiler.

Is the campus all water now?
Surprised there were no GARNs involved.

I did a similar install but with pellet boilers, all building on campus were converted to water, and underground piping for heat transfer. Complete with flow and btu measurements at every building.

Taylor

Steve Ebels_3

It is indeed a locomotive type boiler. The bottom picture shows the feed doors for the firebox which sits underneath the boiler itself. Rough dimensions of the box are about 4' tall, 9 feet wide and probably 16 feet long. The pressure vessel/fire tube heat exchanger is just about 19' long and 5' in diameter.

The picture here is looking in one of the 2 feed doors.
In the pictures above, the centrifugal blower you see was the secondary combustion air source.

PinkTavo

Cool stuff...I also envy anyone who gets to spend any summer time in the UP! Heaven on Earth.