SunMachine Pellet Boiler Update

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Some pictures and details of the unique
SunMachine Pellet boiler

In my previous posts on the German company "SunMachine" I gave some basic details of their very innovative wood pellet machine CHP Unit (Combined Heat and Power).

I wrote to the company requesting some more specific details and photos etc. It would seem the company are further developing the design and were therefore not forthcoming with information, I received the following answer in reply to my request:

Dear Mr. McGinley, Sorry for replying to you not earlier. We would like to thank you very much for the short publication to our Sunmachine® Pellet as wood pellet CHP machine. That’s great to hear and that you are interested in more information. At the moment we are doing a lot of improvements and further developments on our CHP machine within the next months. In the same way we are currently developing a new corporate design which means, that the Sunmachine® Pellet will be presented in new colors too. Based on this current situation we would prefer to do a more detailed publication first in Spring. Would that be fine for you?
Thanks and best regards,
Roland Schmid
Head of Corporate Communications
Sunmachine GmbH
im Innovationspark Allgäu Am Riedbach 1
D - 87499 Wildpoldsried


I Poke around and find some interesting bits

So me - being me - I go and do a litle digging and poking around for further details of this innovative design. I came accross a video on YouTube (link below) and other details which I share here with you.

So what I have is pictorial, some are pulls from the video and others from pdf literature. They give a bit more of a picture of the SunMachine pellet boiler. It looks as if the air supply is delivered up through the hopper and the delivery tube along with the pellets, that is, if I am correct, another innovative feature of this unit.

I would love to see a simple pellet boiler only version of this machine. I am not convinced of the CHP concept, and it makes the unit very expensive overall. A simple boiler should be able to deliver 14+Kw of heat - more than enough for a small to medium sized well insulated house.

This is a good quality drawing of the unit
you can see it even better if you click on it

This series show the hopper and pellet delivery system

Close-up of the top of the boiler

Looking down the air and pellet delivery tube into the grate
If you look carefully you can see a pellet in the act of dropping

A detail of the flame - looks like a pressure jet burner!

Finally, I have included a link to a YouTube video showing the machine and its test set up the quality of the video is not great but you will get a fair idea of the unit nevertheless.

One thing struck me though, was the noise of the unit. if it is as noisy as I think, it would require major sound baffling and might need to be in an out building. I would also guess that most of that noise on the video is coming from the Stirling engine?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nImzzL1QLA&NR=1

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