| I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1] Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger quantities (the videos linked in other comments don't show them too well) http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7
http://ricehusk.cc/ They're a fascinating material, quite unlike anything else in nature. They've got this really high silica content and unique lattice structure that makes them really tough. They've got a weird particle size/shape, making them fluffy but also with a very high angle of repose (meaning you can pile them up into an almost vertical wall) Trouble is that it's hard to do anything economically productive with them. Those boats in the picture I linked above float all around the Mekong delta, not all of them dropping of the rice hull to someone that would use it. I was surprised to see quite big rice hullers (2 stories tall) being operated by a few guys all over rural Cambodia. The big challenge for most people seemed to be financing the fuel not the upfront capital investment of the huller. The most prevalent technology was diesel powered hullers. Some people were piloting gasifiers that would use the rice hulls themselves as fuel. Anyway, I could go on and on. Very interesting to see someone in the US playing around with this stuff! [1] https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent... |