The Donaldsonville chief. [volume] (Donaldsonville, La.) 1871-current, 1874-07-25
MISCELLANY.
THE COMING FUEL.

Peat Turned into Camel Coal i'm
Thirty Minutes--A LOng-vexed Prob
lem Solved at Last--If is Promised
I'm Abundance at 80 Ton.
A letter which recently appeared in the
World detailing new process for the con-
version of peat into fuel in forty-eight
hours has attracted general attention. and
brought to light another invention of
still more remarkable character, which
completes the process .in thirty minutes.
The last takes the spongy, wet, sticky bog
earth and changes it into dry fuel, hard
enough to take polish, and dry as can
mel coal. Peat, everybody knows, is coal
soft and unbaked. In some slowly drying
lake moss and turf have grown, layer
above layer, tree-trunks have sunk into the
mass, and the whole has slowly thickened
and increased year by year till the lake
is gone, and quaking bog is left in its
place, on whose surface the moss and
grass and sedge spread and thicken till it
has grown above the old level of the lake.
spread up the hillside, twenty, thirty,
forty feet. drowning out whole forests with
steady rise. Meanwhile the old layers
are gradually changing, the plant stems
turn black as the carbon separates from
the hydrocarbons of organic growth, till
at last the sticky black clay is the best fuel
curious chain of chemical compounds that
make a fuel worth something in the man.
ufacture of gas are there-enough of car
bon to equal the best coal none, or the
merest trace, Of phosphorus and silicon,
that make fuel worthless in iron manufac-
ture less cinder and less ash than any
other natural fuel known; no smoke and
no Stag, more volatile products and more
carbon; all this-and with it 80, 40, so,
60 per cent. of water, and water does not
burn. In time nature can be trusted to
dry the peat and give in place coal, drain
ing the water with sudden tits Of strata,
squeezing it out with great masses
of everything rock, or baking it
with internal fires, and at last-in a few
million years more or less-the result is
coal. The new machine takes the peat
and drops it out in hard cylinders, dry and
solid in half an hour more or less. Men
have tried to dry peat time out of mind.
1rishmen take it now as they did thou
sand years ago, cut it into square blocks
and dry it in the sun. Half the water
leaves it and half stays, and loose, light,
fibrous mass is left with no cohesion,
which cannot be handled for transporta-
ton or burnt in any furnace more elabor
ate than cotter's hearth. 1t will not
''standn blast, men say. In all temperate
climates the peat even to get this product
can be dried only four or five months OF
the year. If a large supply is wanted it
must be done under cover. The first frost
leaves worthless, disintegrated mass, and
the manufacture takes from two to four
weeks, long while in a short season. 1t
is some fifty years since men began to i'm
prove on the rude process. Peat has been
squeezed in cones fitting into each other,
rammed into cylindrical molds with
heavy pistons, whirled in centrifugal dry
ing machines, stamped into.squaresssmoOth
blocks, stirred and puddIed in the hope
that it would set; but stamped, or whirl-
ed, or puddled it still takes days, perhaps
weeks, to dry Heat, artificial or natural,
must be applied to complete the work, and
the resulting product has too much water
and too little cohesion. The new process
is the result of years of experiment in
secluded nook on the Hudsonsat an ex-
pense fsome $50,000. Three things must
be done. The peat must be dried, it must
be left in a'solid mass, and it must be ne
cessarily handled. 1t costs something to
pick up block of peat and carry it ten
feet even. A combination of two previous
processes is used in the new machine. The
peat is dried by the direct application of
furnace heat and solidified by the blows of
an iron plunger. To these is added the
novel feature of the new machine-drying
by utilizing the latent heat of steam. The
peat is fed into an ordinary pugmill vat
where the semi-fiuid mass is stirred-very
much as the cream in freezer is kept in
smotion-and partly dried by a steam.jacket
which surrounds the vat. Into the peat
pipe communicating witha a high-pressure
boiler is led, and just opposite the mouth OF
this pipe another opens, which runs on
out of the vat and through the furnace
which heats the boiler just mentioned.
When the machine is in motion the sue
cessive jets of superheated steam in their
leap from pipe to pipe force along steady
stream of peat, and by successive blows
push it on its way through the furnace.
Here it might become hardened and stick
if it were not for another property possess
ed by peat that under high temperature
its tarry and pyroligneous particles melt
and the whole become plastic yielding
mass which slides along under repeated
impacts from the steam. At last the peat
is discharged into cylindrical chamber,
while the steam rises to the surface of the
chamber and is conveyed to the steam
jacket surrounding the peat vat. Freed
from the steam the peat comes under the
blows of a heavy iron plunger, worked by
an eccentric, which forces out coil of
solid peat, anywhere from two TO eight
inches in diameter, according to the size
Of the machine. To travel from the vat to
the pllinger, and to pass from wet peat to
dry fuel has taken about thirty minutes.
This machine turns out an article ready
for fHel iJ loses none of its volatile pro-
ducts, and it is turned into solid. homo
geneous body by the cementing effect of
the half.melted mitch. The same furnace