Fu′el, Arti-fi′cial.
Agglomerated peat, sawdust, coal-dust, and slack, one or more of them in various combinations, bound together, by heavy pressure, with cements, clay, coal-tar, or the residuum of starch-manufacture.
The latter is used in the Belgian and
Austrian works.
Dehaynin's works in
Belgium turn out 175,000 tons of this fuel per year.
It leaves six per cent of ashes.
The Northern Railway of
Austria has works which produce 15,000 tons per annum; prisms 9 × 5 × 4 1/2 inches, weighing eight pounds, evaporating seven pounds of water per pound of fuel.
The coal is compressed with the refuse of starch-works as a cement, and dried in a kiln heated overhead by a current of hot air.
Small coal two parts and clay one part, molded into blocks like cannon-balls and dried, have been used for a century past in Hainault. —
London Monthly Magazine, April 1, 1800.
Peat and turf cut into blocks and dried have been used any time these thousands of years past, but the business of preparing peat-fuel by mechanical means and by admixtures is comparatively modern.
(See peat-machine. In 1603
Sir Hugh Platt published a book in which he described a new fuel block made of coal and loam in “the manner of Lukeland of Germanie.”
He also used coal-slack, sawdust, tanner's bark, aggregated by loam and cow-dung.
Chabanne's English patent of 1799 claimed separating the large coal from the small coal by passing the latter through sieves or gratings made of wood or metal, and then consolidating the small coal by mixing it with earth, clay, cow-dung, tar, pitch, broken glass, sulphur, sawdust,
oil-cakes, tan, or wood, or any other combustible ingredient, to be mixed together and ground with a wheel in water, in a wooden vessel; this mixture he afterwards placed in pits provided with drains for the water to run off, and then, when dry, molded the mass into cakes of a considerable size.
The following
United States patents may be consulted: —
| 13,056 | 1855. | 44,262 | 1864. |
| 15,688 | 1856. | 44,940 | 1864. |
| 26,541 | 1859. | 47,296 | 1865. |
| 35,472 | 1862. | 50,588 | 1865. |
| 40,753 | 1863. | 51,833 | 1866. |
| 40,791 | 1863. | 53,431 | 1866. |
| 40,920 | 1863. | 55,369 | 1866. |
| 42,163 | 1864. | 61,006 | 1867. |
| 43,112 | 1864. |
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|
Fuel-dryer. |
