Rocket Oven owners...

Hi.
Its starting to cool off here, so I'm thinking a lot  about burning things... responsibly.

If you own a rocket oven, I am interested in asking you about an unusual use: making charcoal in it.
Making charcoal is akin to baking wood.
Baking wood in a very efficient wood fired oven seems like a good idea.
There are some existing designs for charcoal making devices that utilize a rocket to heat the wood to pyrolysis , but they all suffer from being hard to load and unload.
Rocket ovens have nicely fitted doors as part of their basic design, so they have the loading and loading taken care of.

The simplest idea is to  fill a black oven with wood and  fire up the rocket.
With the contents of the oven are already exposed to the rocket exhaust(in some cases the riser exits directly into the oven itself) gasses emitted from the wood can join with the exhaust from the rocket.
Would these gasses burn clean or would they just be driven off?
Would the wood in the oven simply burn?
Both of these questions seem to hinge on the available oxygen at the point where the off gassing happens.
A loose fitting oven door could allow the gasses and the wood to burn, and not cleanly.
The gasses would also be injected after the heat riser.
I'm not sure if a black oven would work, for these reasons.


Less simple would be a white oven with a way to route the pyrolysis gasses into the flame path of the rocket.
A hole near where the exhaust hits the bottom of the  oven might be enough.
That solution might still leave  the pyrolysis gasses without enough oxygen to burn right, but it should keep the wood itself pretty safe.
Pipes that deliver the gasses from the oven into the firebox or burn tube should work ok, drawing in oxygen like the rest of the fuel in this area.
Provisions to stop the fire from drafting up these pipes might need to be made.
Some of the first gasses released during pyrolysis are inimical to combustion, but I don't think off gassing them is worth the trouble  so I would rather keep it simple and let things be slightly  less efficient.
From what I have learned about retorts that use pipes  to route  gas, tar blockage can be an issue.
I therefor would want to keep the path as strait as possible and never allow the pipe to cool off.

So, there it is.
Do you think a rocket oven can be used to "bake" wood into charcoal cleanly?
Can it be done simply?
Could it help create a longer burn time for both batch box and j rockets?

I think there is  a lot of potential, both for people who make biochar now, and people who use rocket stoves, ovens, or heaters.  My general sense is that things will tend to lean one way or another. One could be optimized for your situation, improving present performance but not for all possible outcomes.  I like these kinds of posts because they get people thinking in new ways that lead to future solutions and experiments.

John S
PDX OR