I filled a empty 1 gallon paint can with wood chips and I poked a hole in the top and I put it on a propane burner and I turned it on and smoke and tar and water came out. I think I made a propane gasifier. I wanted to make charcoal and wood vinegar but I think I made syngas instead. I think no matter how I try to condense that smoke it wont happen. Am I close?
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Phillip,
I believe if you kept up what you were doing, captured and ran the âsmokeâ through a condenser, you would get wood vinegar in the condensate, and eventually the wood in the can would be charcoal. It would be a long process and hard to get enough heat to complete this process in the open with an un-insulated can (which is your âretortâ). I participated in a smaller, test-tube scale high-school science experiment where we did just that. Make sure you leave a pressure vent in your condensing apparatus, you will guess how I know that⌠(kapow!) 
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You made a dry distiller. The product is not syngas, the mechanism of that is different. You made pyrolisis gas. It will condense with ease if it touches any cold enaugh surface
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Thanks Keistjan. I look forward to your advice. I was torn today. I had highs and lows. The internet says 750F for real charcoal and real wood vinegar and I feel bad if I dont do that because I feel I am doing something wrong. I always get flame but I cant tell if its syngas burning or wood vinegar vapor burning.
I did the NaOH and Aluminum experiment and I made Methane and I torched both with a lighter. The methane went âpoofâ and the hydrogen went âBAMâ and it stung like hell. My flame now is much more poof.
Explain my tar problem in wood vinegar. I did a bad job at dry distillation because I used way too much heat. I gots lots of tar. I dont think tar is bad and I understand I have to get tar but if I do dry distillation the way I should at 750F does the tar become more liquid? I can make a chamber and keep it at 750F because that needs to be done. I ask because the wood vinegar people dont complain about tars. Do I get tar at 750F or does it come as liquid in wood vinegar ? I designed a big tar trap but do I really need that at 750F ?
Paper pulp people call tar lignin and they have a specialty boiler to burn it usefully. The scientists say they can make cyclohexanes from lignin. Cyclohexanes are like gasoline. Im aware tars as really plant medicine. The hemicellulose is/are the food fuels. Turpentine, Acetic Acid, Methanol and Formic Acid. Acetic Acid, Turpentine and Formic Acid are Azeotropes. Im running my mouth to see if Im wrong on this.
Go ahead and tell me what to expect at 750F.
Thanks
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Thank you Mike I appreciate your time. Keep up the good work.
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You did fine. what you are doing is wood distillation. Tar is one of the outputs and it condenses the easiest. If it gets more watery, your condensing is working better and you can get some stuff like methanol and ethanol that is lighter then water. coming out of it⌠Then you still have some gases some of which are burnable.
You might check out
and one other project, the hornito! 
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Hi Sean, thats a good link. Thank you. I can use some of that. My feed stock is different, my materials are different. I dont have that kind of bamboo. My charcoal ovens are made from 55 gallon flattened drums. They dont talk about distillation, they use gravity to separate the vinegar.
There are a few configurations to manage the heat. A gasifier would make heat for several ovens. A rocket stove would make heat for one oven and solar can be used. In the short term Id make a Cadillac oven for learning and evaluating.
If you make wood vinegar the right way you wont get tars like I did that are pasted all over the pipes. You get tars- lignin-phenols but they are liquid.
Wood is an insulator- if you pack a 55 gallon drum to cook the wood the stuff in the middle wont cook.
When you make charcoal you get syngas even if its not from a gasifier.
This paper is good at least it tells me what I want to hear.
This paper favors temperature gradients, you want to cook the hemicellulose first from 210C to 370C. This favors less phenol and and more acid and ketones like acetone. Methanol isnt a ketone or phenol but its more like acid. You have to do good QA. The hemicellulose has the food fuels I am looking for
study in which pyrolysis was performed on each of the main wood components - cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin - using a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) showed that cellulose decomposition occurred mainly from 260 to 410 °C, hemicellulose decomposed mainly in the range of 210 to 370 °C, and lignin decomposed over a wide range of temperatures from 200 to approximately 600 °C (Quan et al., 2016).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2589014X23001615
Phillip
Acetone is not the conjugate base of Acetic Acid even tho the two names rhyme. However, both can be converted into the other with simple reactions.
Wood Vinegar has methanol and turpentine and both are fuels. Formic Acid makes Carbon Monoxide so it makes Hydrogen eventaully.
Green Acetone is the base chemical for plastics and sells for six to ten times more than the acetic acid does.
I can see selling a wood vinegar franchise to provide individuals with the equipment to make wood vinegar and charcoal and have them disburse out into the country to bring back various products in 55 gallon drums.
Acetic Acid makes methane which is a drop in fuel.
Charcoal makes better syngas and that gas turns into Hydrogen with a Water Gas Shift reactor. That reactor is a pipe stuffed with charcoal. After that is cryogenic gas separation and then to a Hydrogen Fuel Cell.
This meets generic biomass requirements for utility sales and meets IRA 45v for green hydrogen production if the administration doesnât turn that off.
Phillip
Pipe the gas out to a chiller / condensor but pipe that gas back to the retort and use it for process heat, you can then turn the LP way down and let it provide its energy for its process heat.
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Actually you can return the pyrolysis gas back to your water shift reactor to use as fuel gas to heat your charcoal reactor for the water shift reaction. or use it for both if there is enough surplus.
This is where we need to start inovating. Weve inovated the wood gasifier to death, they are not going to get any better. This is an area that can be improved to build an over all better system.
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You are missing the key point. When you heat up wood or any biomass in a closed container, and heat it. It is destructive distillation. You are distilling the wood or biomass in the container. It isnât referring to the liquid you get from the distillation. When you condense that from the distillation process. You get MANY different chemicals and compounds like over 200. For wood vinegar it is very typical to let gravity separate it into layers to get the different fractions. then wood vinegar is the middle fraction. You can get different chemicals or different proportions of chemicals from different biomass but the process is all the same. It doesnât need to be bamboo at all, and to be woody, it should be a woody type of plant.
You can absolutely do fractional distillation to separate them into their individual components all by temperature, but it is a lot harder because you have to monitor the temperature and keep switching receptacle containers and there are 200+ different chemicals in it so it is a lot of switching.
Wood vinegar itself is just all the chemicals that sit in that middle layer after settling.
I posted a video somewhere on the site that has a breakdown for different temperatures for charcoal and their various properties. I think I found it last year. Those are more likely the temperatures you are trying to achieve. But it relates to the temperatures of the products you are boiling out of the material as well.
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Sean,
Thank for replying. I appreciate your time. The name wood vinegar is a vauge term in my understanding. I thought it refered to all the liquid that comes from the process. You stated its the middle portion in the settled liquid. Does wood vinegar really mean vinegar like its usually used? Like from grapes? 90 percent water and 10 percent acetic acid? Others use the term in a different way. They like the pesticides but they still call it wood vinegar. Plants eat NPK they dont eat acetic acid. Bacteria eat acetic acid. I dont see how this is plant food unless it decomposes first. I agree there are lots of compounds in this liquid. Im only interested the few I have mentioned. The rest gets discarded. There are 73000 tree species and they are all different but alike. There is a machine called mass spectrometry and the reports are $500 each. I found a paper and they did mass spectrometry on one common pine and they found about 15 compounds. Settlement takes 90 days. Id like to see the results but waiting that long makes me fidget. Id agree to make daily samples but I need product right away. Yes, different compounds will have different densities. There might be a half dozen different plants in one batch too so youll get more layers.
Methanol .791 g/ml
Acetic Acid 1.049 g/ml
Water 1 g/ml
Turpentine .86 g/ml
AA and T are temperature azeotropes while the have different densities
Methanol will float above Acetic Acid etc
That you for showing me that if I got your message
Phillip
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No. I think you answered that question for yourself.
It is a mixture of water soluable chemicals. I do not recall what the chemicals are. It looks like the acetic acid portion can be 2-10% by weight. It is called pyrolytic acetic acid if you want to google it. It is in the water layer. which sits on top of the tar layer, and the methanol layer is on top of that.
This is a paper on separation of the fractions. The swedes are your friend. www.Sci-hub.se will help you.
https://scijournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bbb.2273
correct sort of. The bacteria and other microbes eat the npk+ and emit it in a form that the plants can use. It is co-evolution. Before I go on another soil health rant. It is important for plants to have the right microbes. I covered it in âfood self-sufficiency tips and hacksâ thread.
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Just confirming.
We call it hopper juice - the yellow watery liquid that wood has been sweating in our fuel hoppers and what remains when the tar has settled.
Last year on our Swedish woodgas meetup a young guy reported he analysed his hopper juice at his university. He reported that apart from water the majority was acetic acid CH3COOH - a mild biodegradable acid. When dumping hopper juice at the roadside trace amounts of probably the terpentine and methanol can be seen as well. A rainbow colored surface - much like a drop of gasoline in a puddle of water.
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Hi the internet says methanol, water and acetic acid are polarized liquids meaning they are miscible and wont layer out at least not right away hence the 90 day wait. The density has to overcome the polar bonds
Im not impressed with wet-water distillation of wood for methanol, it doesnât produce much. Id gave all kinds of action with dry distillation in the same time.
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The requirement to have a constant 750F to make charcoal and distillates requires Arduino controls. I have that to do now too
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