Air Burners T-400 Operating Manual page 21

Air Burners, Inc.
T-400 Air Curtain Trench Burner with Kubota V3600-TE Engine
OPERATING MANUAL
SITE PREPARATION
Faster operation through staging the wood piles
Air Burners Trench Burners were designed primarily as a pollution control device, but
operated correctly, they will burn clean wood two or three times faster than open burn-
ing. To achieve the best throughput the fire must remain at the highest temperature
possible. You achieve this by remembering three rules:
1) Don't smother the fire with a huge load of wood waste or a load of very dense
material.
2) Load "less more often": load smaller bucket loads more often.
3) Sort out a pile of your best burnable wood, use it as fuel to create a hot fire.
The basic principle of operation is not too different from a campfire. You use your best
wood to get it started and if the fire dies down you add some more "Good Wood" to
bring it back up. The big difference is that on your campfire you are probably not add-
ing root balls and leaves and pine needles. These are the high moisture content and
dense materials that bring the fire temperature down.
If you overload the machine with materials that have high moisture content such as
tree branches with leaves and needles, or green branches such as palm fronds, then
the temperature drops (smoke increases) and your burn rate slows down. While these
are certainly ok to burn in the pit, you want to add them to a hot fire, so they dry out
and ignite quickly. To keep the temperature up and to maintain the highest throughput
of waste, you should mix the very burnable wood with the less burnable materials
throughout the course of the burning operation. The most common way to accomplish
this is to stage a pile of the most burnable materials or what we call the "two pile sys-
tem."
"If it's burning clean it's burning fast, If there is smoke you're losing money."
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