The Development of Furnace/Heat Exchanger Systems in which Chopped Cereal Straw is the Fuel

Summary

Much of the current straw burning equipment for farmhouse heating is unsatisfactory in several respects — for example manual bale handling, batch fuelling and combustion in a water-cooled chamber. Attempts to overcome these problems, most of which stem from the fact that the straw is harvested in bales, tend to involve considerable expense.

In many ways a more logical approach is to harvest, store, handle and burn straw in the chopped form, but some of the proposals for such a system would be expensive to install and would have the disadvantage of storing the straw adjacent to the dwelling and very close to the boiler. An approach which should be cheaper, cleaner and safer is to use a totally enclosed trailer to act as a mobile hopper/stoker and in order to improve the efficiency of combustion, to use a furnace/ heat exchanger unit rather than a boiler.