wood kilns
The problem is handling rehandling and rehandling the fire wood,
the problem with using either a short shipping container or a 30 or 40 or 53 footer or a standard wood kiln is complicated due to several factors.
The standard kiln design for drying lumber.
kilns usually have bad logs for fire wood, fire wood is secondary market for a lumber kiln business
The gentleman I chatted with at Nyle dry kilns told me that it is pound foolish to buy lumber kiln when a forced air furnace will do the job.
The firewood is dumped in to baskets then moved into the kiln and then the kiln is heated to the certified temperature for the required time then removed and set a side to be delivered or bagged in a sealed bag.
If you have a large wood lot you harvest the fire wood, buck it to length
or use a processor and then dump it in a bin or on the ground to pile it in the crate for drying later.
Thw air flow in a kiln is blocked by the fire wood as it is simply dumped in a basket to be dried, the air has to go around and around and around to dry it, where witha wood kiln the lumber is separated by stickers to allow air flow for drying quickly and evenly.
The only way you will gain any efficiency is to have an I beam trolley set up in the kiln-
The trolley would carry a firewood basket with built as a cylinder the diameter being smaller than the the cross sectional area of the shipping container and shorter than the length of the shipping container due to the steel ibeams supporting the trolley and the load of firewood.
The cylinder is built with angle iron as a hexagon with bracing to support the length of the cylinder.
The one section of the cylinder-hexagon is the full length door that is used to fill and empty the cylinder by rotating it and dumping it in a trailer or truck under neath it.
the trolley carries and consists of two triangular steel end weldments that support the cylinder with bearings mounted on the base of the triangle supporting the drum. there additional angle iron pieces connecting both of the triangular frames supprting the bearings that allow free movement of the drum,
The door could be modified and made larger into two doors using two panels of the six sided hexagon.
The cylinder could be fed processed fire wood right out of the processor with a conveyor or hand dumped into a conveyor filling the cylinder.
The cylinder is filled with firewood, the door or doors is locked and it is rolled back into the kiln.
A siimple electric motor v belt drive or a right angle gearbox and elelctric motor is used to rotate the cylinder on the trolley frame using ball bearings supporting the drive shaft that spins the drum at low rpm.
The furnace would simply have a long tubular or rectangular air duct along the floor under the drum and the air heated and reheated by the furnace would simply be blown into the drum of fire wood as it is rotating pushing air by force into the versus passive air movement in a standard kiln.
the design is slightly modified for the packaged kilns by having two sets of i beams supporting the ends of the drum to carry the drum in and out of the kiln
for loading and dumping dried firewood.
:deadhorse: