[GSBN] Help us help in Haiti

[Derek Roff]

Hi, Bruce,

I appreciate your humor, and your New Year's salutations.  Sign me up 
for the Hawaii Silt Vacation Sweepstakes.

Can you say more about the volume and efficiency that you need in the 
system?  That would help us propose ideas that would be useful to 
you.  For example, are you trying to process a hundred pounds of 
soil, a thousand, or ten thousand per day?

What amount of "waste" soil is acceptable.  I'm guessing that your 
goal is to get at the clay, and that the silt will be a unimportant 
byproduct.  Is that correct?  In wondering about efficiency, I'm 
thinking along these lines:  If the soil is naturally 20% clay and 
30% silt, then the optimum system would extract 2 pounds of clay from 
each ten pounds of soil.  What if you could only extract 1 pound of 
clay from each ten pounds, but you got pretty good purity of that 
clay.  Would that be acceptable?  Alternatively, what if a process 
gave you 4 pounds of product from each 10 pounds of soil, but that 
product was 50% clay?  Would that be useful?  If not, what sort of 
purity percentage would be worthwhile?

Does this process need to be human-powered, or could electrical or 
gasoline motors be a part of the machinery?  What is your "easy 
enough" process for separating the sand and gravel?  Perhaps the clay 
separation process could be added to the sand/gravel separation 
phase.

I have some ideas, and have done some small-scale tests, but I'm not 
sure they would fit your needs.

Dere-"particulate"-lict

Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
Ortega Hall 129, MSC03-2100
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
505/277-7368, fax 505/277-3885
Internet: derek at unm.edu


--On Sunday, January 2, 2011 1:46 PM -0800 Bruce King 
<bruce at ecobuildnetwork.org> wrote:

> Happy New Year, baleheads.
>
> We have a lot of soil in Haiti that is rich in both clay and silt.
> Easy enough to separate the sand and gravel, but we haven't figured
> out a good way to separate silt from clay.  So far we've tried:
>
> 1) Asking nicely
> 2) Offering every silt particle a chance to win a Hawaiian dream
> vacation if it separates itself from the clay
> 3) Telling the silt that if it just leaves quietly now, no one will
> get hurt
> and, getting really hardball,
> 4) Hanging a few "example particles" of silt by their silica
> crystals  in the public square, with warning notes attached.
>
> Still no luck!  Anyone have a good low-tech field method for
> separation?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bruce "Hang 'em High!" King


Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
Ortega Hall 129, MSC03-2100
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
505/277-7368, fax 505/277-3885
Internet: derek at unm.edu