Hey All,
I just joined AAC with the purpose of taking advantage of the extensive knowledge base here.
I need to know if it is feasible to use an inductive heating circuit to directly heat the steel drum of a very small capacity coffee sample roaster. The roaster looks like this:
Using induction might be more of a novelty than anything, but it could actually present some real advantages to the roasting process of coffee over and against using a resistive heating element to indirectly heat the steel roast drum. Heat transfer is very important in roasting coffee so turning the drum into the source of heat would improve efficiency, at least in theory.
This video on YouTube was what got me to thinking about using induction to directly heat the roaster drum:
Questions:
1. Is induction a more efficient way to heat?
2. Would it be feasible to surround the rotating drum with heavy gauge copper coils to directly heat it?
3. How important would it be to tune the circuit to resonance to achieve peak efficiency?
Bonus question:
Would it also be feasible to use induction to rotate the drum? As I understand it, eddy currents cause the aluminum disk to spin in the electro-mechanical KW/hr meter like the utilities install for metering our power.
Any thoughts are appreciated, even if it's to shoot holes in my idea.
What do you think?
I just joined AAC with the purpose of taking advantage of the extensive knowledge base here.
I need to know if it is feasible to use an inductive heating circuit to directly heat the steel drum of a very small capacity coffee sample roaster. The roaster looks like this:
Using induction might be more of a novelty than anything, but it could actually present some real advantages to the roasting process of coffee over and against using a resistive heating element to indirectly heat the steel roast drum. Heat transfer is very important in roasting coffee so turning the drum into the source of heat would improve efficiency, at least in theory.
This video on YouTube was what got me to thinking about using induction to directly heat the roaster drum:
Questions:
1. Is induction a more efficient way to heat?
2. Would it be feasible to surround the rotating drum with heavy gauge copper coils to directly heat it?
3. How important would it be to tune the circuit to resonance to achieve peak efficiency?
Bonus question:
Would it also be feasible to use induction to rotate the drum? As I understand it, eddy currents cause the aluminum disk to spin in the electro-mechanical KW/hr meter like the utilities install for metering our power.
Any thoughts are appreciated, even if it's to shoot holes in my idea.
What do you think?