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Upcoming Events Next Open House: 5-7pm 6/14
July Open House: 5-7pm 7/12
Next Workshop: August 9-11
APL at the San Francisco Exploratorium August 20 11-3
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The GEK went to university….University of Minnesota at Morris to be exact. UMM was awarded a grant of $174,258 by the Renewable Energy Marketplace – Alliance for Talent Development (MNREM) initiative to develop new curriculum in biomass gasification technology. Jim Barbour at the university partnered with ALL Power Labs to use the GEK as the platform for learning in this three-week intensive course. The Class, Renewable Energy with Biomass Gasification, taught principles of biomass gasification with a focus on chemical, biological and economic considerations of biomass energy production. All students benefited through a curriculum of hands-on training in chemistry and biomass with classroom and lab activities.
APL’s Jim Mason went out as a guest lecturer for the last few days of class. The class had an amazing lab set up. Great data was gathered and more people were indoctrinated into the cult of the black goo. Look at their set-up.
Gasification – It’s a gas!
Cheers,
Jess and your GEK making crew
The ALL Power Labs crew is decompressing from talking enthusiastically for two days straight about small-scale-DIY-open-source-energy. We took our GEK v3.o with new Auger and GCU to Maker Faire 2009. For added flaire we made a special Art Deco Hopper for the new auger, check it out.
With all of the added improvements GEK v3.0 made incredibly clean gas all weekend long. In an average day at ALL Power Labs we spend a lot of time playing and tinkering with Biomass gasification and the one thing missing from this weekend was the liqiud smoke smell. The gas was so clean we had little to no “black goo”. The clean gas did not do much to support the “cult of the black goo”. With such clean gas coming out of the v3.0 the cult of the black goo might now be a misnomer, maybe it should be…cult of biomass…or cult of syngas…or cult of low tar….none of these quite have the same ring. But maybe I am looking at it the wrong way, cults often praise something that is invisible or unknowable, maybe that is what we are looking at here with v3.0 the black goo [...]
ALL Power Labs recently had a visitor from Germany who got the point of why a “Personal Energy Device” might helpfully be made to look like a robot rocketship. His name is Joerg Pfeiffer, and was travelling across the US for Spiegel Online doing stories about energy and the economy. As he is German, and in the US, he of course rented a giant RV and spent most of his time in the desert doing stories about Americans doing weird things. At the end of his journey, he did a story about us.
Joerg’s video does the best job to date of explaining the larger context of the GEK. He was less interested in the tech and more interested in the social experiment as a parallel to the early desktop PC kits, the hacker culture that arose around them, and the importance of Bay Area culture to the whole thing. This is of course the larger context and agenda of the GEK and its creators at ALL Power Labs.
Not to ruin the suspense, but the point of the GEK is to make an Altair 8800 of energy. A personal scale power device that opens the door to a [...]
Here in Berkeley, at ALL Power Labs, in our Oasis of small scale gasification, the team has had our noses to the gridstone manufacturing and testing GEK version 3.0.
The new version’s highlights are: A new injector venturi system that replaces our fan/blower system and a new one-nozzle air inlet collar.
There are many other updates, like a new cyclone design which allows for easier clean out. But the best upgrade of all; our new Rocket Legs!
And if version 3.0 weren’t enough to get you excited, we have also been developing an auger drying/preheating system, which can be used with any GEK version and is available now, just take a look at our purchase page for details, or as always, contact us, we’d love to answer your questions: gek [at] allpowerlabs [dot] org.
More Great v3.0 images coming soon.
Cheers, The GEK crew
v3.0 MAJOR NEW FEATURES
1. New Ejector/Venturi based gas pumping, mixture and flare. – No more axial blower or long flex tube to flare – Flare hard mounts on unit in one of the three points described below – Variable Air/Syngas mixing for tunable mixture to the flare or attached engine.
2. Three modes of [...]
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