Still looking outside the box.
Lawrence Cazan Cassini
I Partner with Innovative Health Care Professionals who are Proactive in Prevention in Healthcare | Anti-Aging Guru. Mentor, International Visionary and Speaker.
Having tried a good idea which did not work out, I was still determined to lower costs of production and reduce waste in our process of drying the tobacco.
At the time we were using Lignite which is like coal, but much more fragile since it can physically break more easily than coal and becomes chipped. This meant that we had about 20 loss between the lignite delivered and the lignite actually used.
One day I visited the lignite mine which was a huge open pit with trucks going into this and filling up with the lignite which was being excavated by diggers.
On the periferi of the mine was a very large mountain of lignite dust and chips. There was smoke coming from the top. I was told that the rain causes the inside of the mountain of lignite to internally combust. The manager of the mine also told me that this was a problem because of the space and time it took to remove the chips from the mine and store them on this big heap.
Once again I thought of briquettes. I wondered whether we could successfully. make briquettes to use in the curing barns.
With a couple of engineers we set about trying to find a solution.
Approximately 4 months later we were able to produce a briquette made from compacted lignite powder. But...
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We could not get it burn. The perfect egg shaped briquette looked great, we knew the ingredients would work but we could not get them to burn.
The briquette machine, comprised two wheels with concave with egg sized indentations working opposite direction to each other and the lignite particles would fall between the two wheels and get compressed.
We were very frustrated, when by sheer accident the two wheels turning were not perfectly aligned and the resulting briquette had a "lip"
This proved to be the solution. The fire would start from the lip since oxygen was available to combust with the lignite.
Once we had figured out a way to make these, I approached the owner of the mine and discussed "helping him" get rid of the waste for a small fee.
We were paying several dollars a ton for the lignite. We agreed on a price for us to dispose of the problem and were able to use the briquettes.
Lesson. Frustration but not giving up. Necessity is the mother of creation.