Back in the middle of the Summer, I received an email from a client saying we had won an award. But I couldn’t say much about it until now. I’ve been working with Bill Smith and Al Meyer at Infinity Fuel Cell & Hydrogen since they were a two person company. In fact, they were my first client when I started Callahan Engineering. The company has grown since then, and being a recipient of a 2011 R&D 100 Award recognizes a significant technology development that we have been working on with the NASA Glenn Research Center and Qinetiq North America.
A fuel cell is a device that converts flowing hydrogen (or a hydrogen rich stream) and flowing oxygen (or an oxygen rich stream like air) to produce electricity without combustion. The specific innovation that Infinity has developed reduces the need for moving parts like pumps and blowers and prevents the need for venting the fuel cell. This increases efficiency of the device and NASA likes efficiency when it comes to the power sources for their space missions.
About the R&D 100 Awards From the R&D Magazine website – “The Awards, widely recognized as the “Oscars of Innovation”, identifies and celebrates the top high technology products of the year. Sophisticated testing equipment, innovative new materials, chemistry breakthroughs, biomedical products, consumer items, high-energy physics: the R&D 100 Awards spans industry, academia, and government-sponsored research.”
Earlier this year I was asked to be involved in the design of a mobile hops picker by Dr. Heather Darby of University of Vermont Extension. The intent of the project was to develop a hops picker that could be used by multiple growers in the Northeast. Typically, hops are grown in vast centralized yards and most operations are large enough to support their own hop picker (a large, expensive machine that requires a great deal of maintenance and is only used for about 4-6 weeks per year).
There is a resurgence in interest in growing hops in the Northeast as consumers, and brewers seek local ingredients with predictably unique characteristics that set distinguish their beers. There is also a desire to grow a broader variety of hops in a more distributed and integrated way to avoid common diseases that have resulted in poor yields recently among the major hop producing areas.
Here is another video in which Gene L’Etoile of Four Star Farms in Northfield, MA explains his hops operation, the mobile harvester in its first year of use , and his approach to drying and packing for a local market.
As the saying goes, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” Thus it sometimes feels at my home. I am usually busy helping others consider, design, install, troubleshoot and optimize their renewable energy systems and tend to neglect my own. This is the premise of my excuse for taking 2 years to complete my solar hot water system for domestic hot water heating. The second component of that excuse rests in my basic incompetence for sweated copper plumbing joints and I attribute one year of (very) part time work to chasing leaks in my system. With the help of some very patient friends, I finally filled the system with Cryotek and water and when the sun hit the tubes, presto, we were in business for making hot water from the sun. [Read more…]
Chris recently collaborated with Paul Betz at High Ledge Farm to assess, plan and implement the outdoor wood gasifier installed for greenhouse heating at the Woodbury, VT farm. A report on the project can be found on the UVM Vegetable and Berry page in the case study section.
The heart of the system is a Central Boiler, eClassic 2300 which meets EPA Phase II emissions regulations for outdoor wood boilers. Paul intends to purchase cord wood cut and split and delivered at a price of $210/cord. With an installed heating system cost of $21,826 and 3 month use (last week of March through May) the system will result in $1,915 savings annually compared to the use of propane fuel purchased for $2.56/gallon. When fueled by renewable cord wood at current pricing for wood and propane the system will have a payback period of 11 years and avoid roughly 6 tons of CO2 emissions annually (equivalent to approximately 14,441 miles of average passenger car travel.)
Chris attended the 2010 Borderview Farm Open House on August 5 and presented to the 200+ attendees on the topic of On Farm Oilseed Processing and Biodiesel Production. This is part of an on-going contract with the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and Callahan Engineering’s work with Roger Rainville at Borderview. Roger hosts a large collection of field trials at his farm which are administered by the UVM Extension NW Crops and Soils Program Team.
As part of larger biomass study regarding greenhouse heating, Callahan Engineering assisted in collecting lessons learned and capturing performance data on the wood gasification boiler in use by Jared and Heather McDermott at Vermont Herb & Salad Company in Benson, VT. The case study summarizes the McDermott’s experiences using the boiler to heat two greenhouses, their processing center and their residence.
Callahan Engineering is pleased to announce the completion of a report on a 2 year study done under contract with UVM Extension with 14 greenhouse growers exploring the use of renewable fuels for greenhouse heating with funding from the High Meadows Fund.
From the report:
“Greenhouse production in Vermont covers 2 million ft2 and produces $19 million in crops, of which about $4 million are vegetables. We have calculated that the state uses 296,000 gallons of propane and 59,000 gallons of fuel oil each year to heat greenhouses. This equates to a cost of $768,000/yr and 2,458 tons CO2/yr – roughly equivalent to 6.2 million automobile miles.
I’m often asked how much energy can be stored in hot water. The ability for any material to serve as a thermal battery depends on its heat capacity (e.g. units of BTU/lbm/degF), the mass of the material (e.g. units of lbm), and the temperature change imposed (e.g. raising water from 50 degF to 180 degF). For most of the clients I work with, hot water is a simple and effect thermal storage media. I developed this chart to enable people (including me) to quickly and graphically determine how much water (gallons) would be required to cover a certain heat load (BTU/hr) without any explicit math. I hope it is useful for you.
