10 Likes
I am blown away at how advanced this system is. Use of refractory board, ardruno, reuses the syngas, beyond impressed with this designā¦
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Nice build. Heāll need someway to deal with the ash from the spent charcoal when he gasifies. Like a shaker and a grate.
Canāt wait to that.
Evan
4 Likes
It will be interesting to see if this guy actually follows up and tries to run an IC engine on his retort off gases.
I admire much his fabrication skills and obvious forge and kiln understandings based on using woods.
But . . . as an externally wood fired off gases heated charcoal retort maker he is far from the first to do this.
J. Hookway; Texas Martin; KristijanL.; K.V.L and others in the past and currnet.
None of them foolish enough to direct engine run off of the retort made gasses.
Understanding well that these are a burnable combustible for heating because of all of the tars and soot particles. Cool, wash-condense and filter these out and you will mostly have un-combustible carbon dioxide and passed through nitrogen.
To truly convert to cleanable fuel grade gases these must be with air oxygen combusted converted and heated; THEN flowed past a controlled bed of glowing wood charcoal (sacrificing itself in the process) to actually make the primary engine fuel gases of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane.
These are conceptional understandings only found in some books and on true user forums.
Not found by google directed by views counts;YouTube.
YouTubeās actually showing and explaining these things only gets reads of a few hundred to maybe the low 1-2 thousands.
You have to be a real digging books studier to find the explained understandings.
Or thicken skin, and hardened toes; stuck-to-it on the woodgas forums.
Oh well. Tarāed up engines will be his finishing teacher now.
Steve Unruh
13 Likes
I as well, am looking forward to part 2 of this build.
He did mention that he was looking to clean up the gas before going into an engineā¦
My questions as I watched the video the second time was the following:
Exactly where does he intend to inject steam in this process? As he shows a pipe on the upper left, not sure where he was looking to do this injection, I presume into the inner barrel.
Why is the gas coming out so fast on the right side? Are the temps that high that it is driving out the air that fast from the inner barrel? I did not see a fan injecting airā¦ I am sure that all of that insulation is trapping that heat big time and that inner barrel is really cookinā.
I was also thinking this would make a kool pizza oven 
12 Likes
LOLā¦ The devil is in detailā¦ the gas from a retort , after a certain temperature, is actual high grade and non dilutedā¦
Tip: heat the retort from the outside to about 1000 c and inject steam inside the retortā¦
I have one of these retorts, electrical heated, injecting any kind of liquids to make waste to energyā¦
Without any steam/oxygen, or other O carriers, the gas production stops between 650/720 C
( no more smoke, only carbon )
With the electric heating i also inject the condensates, old oil, organic slurry, turning all into useable gas.
Just to be carefullā¦ its dang hotā¦
10 Likes
"Dang hot . . . " But reasonable pressures for the temperature, yes?
I ask because most materials soften and weaken with heat.
Most materials erode with hot gasses or liquids direct contact flows: then weaken.
What was consider safe, becomes very unsafe.
So reasonable, for the common materials we DIY with would be never above 10 bar/~150 psi.
What this fellow has built so far should not be trusted above 2 bar/~35 psi at heated temperatures.
S.U.
9 Likes
Here is an illustration of my safety concerns:
A Ben Peterson designed and made WasteBot system been used first time by an experimenter/user.
I passed and walked away on BenPās early, early thoughts and attempts when we were approaching 175 psi/~12 bar. This much later development shows materials, welds and clamps that should be good for at least 100 bar.
This fellows out-gasses temperatures are in C centigrade/Celsius.
Premade wood charcoal is the heat driver. And supplies added hot carbons. Maybe even the woods natural mineral ash used as catalysts.
I passed on all of these developments; asked not to be told the details, as my interest is only from personally owned property, site grown tree/brush wood fuels. 19th century steam systems level of Tech and T/Pās brought forwards for better efficiencies by gasification of the same woods inputs. Using evolved, existing, refined, late 20th century IC engines for the multiple usages shaft powers. I have no interest being a modern culture clean-up slave-bug. I refuse to be led to being a cockroach.
Looking at the far right hand screen, bubbler. āI-thinkā this system is being also tail-end vacuum pulled for flow too.
Side note that consumer plastics should be consider by ash content as pre-refined clean versus from the ground grown biologic fuels.
āCleanā for mineral ash . . . NOT clean of toxic metallics and such in colorants. Toxic Chlorine and Florine in some plastics too. BenP. only used and authorized #1 and #2 clear plastics. Not #6 and others because of these toxic concerns to the system users and downstream final concentrated wastes.
S.U.
11 Likes
Have you not seen my drum version of this? It does the same exact but my is a stacked system with a 2nd stage kiln on top of the retort. So that batch of fuel is fully dried and will skip the de moistureing process and goes straight to gasification mode. Wrap stainless flex hose around the unit and you get a hot water heater and incentive to run it beyond making charcoal.
Use that gas for heat process use your good charcoal for cooking and gasification. Use the Electric it produces for everything else.
My version is very simple and easier to build and no need for controls just monitior it.
Its also nearly smokeless as well it burns very clean.
10 Likes
I have not reached that level of wizardry as of yet. I have only worked with Garyās simple fire with charcoal. Making the charcoal with pit burn, and running the engine for 15 min a few years ago.
Wood gas has been my get my AC working again if there was an EMP event, so after I got the theory down I put the books on the shelf and have started to explore making alcoholā¦
If you have a link to this setup, I would give it a look over.
Thanksā¦
9 Likes
This is here is the basic and first version. I simply stacked another unit on top to create the top kiln. Its made exaclty like the retort except its botton is the lid for the retort. The center vent tube flows to the botton and feeds into the firebox. The steam from the upper helps control the heat because that thing can nearly melt a hole into the ground. Its like having your own personan Sun 
10 Likes
Im going to be builidng a new smaller one. This big one is a bit to handle bymyself. Id rather run two smaller ones than this giant 55 gal drum version.
8 Likes
The way your dog was watching you, I think she could build the next one. 
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Hi Steve,
Yes, the metal erodes extremely fast and yes, no pressure involved or allowed.
Any design used is build with that in mind.
So many challenges overcome and many more aheadā¦ Working with glowing carbon at extreme temperaturesā¦ fun it isā¦
The one hurdle not to be overlooked , if working with biomass/wood, is the ash content.
Its not about lab testing, its about real life, something between professional and backyardā¦
And, the most important, it is not the device that makes it successful, it still is the operator that can and will screw upā¦ ( i am the operator 
)
10 Likes
I hate seeing the inner barrels as a consumable item. But it is hard to think of a material that is airtight, cheap, conducts heat, handles very high temperatures and doesnāt degrade.
KVL- it hurts my brain to consider resistive heat driven gasification. I can see a place thoughā¦ especially if you have surplus electricity from solar or whatever that you would otherwise dump.
If the fuel was already bone dry and pre-heatedā¦ you wonāt be spending so many watts boiling water (ugh). Taking the fuel up to charcoal temps with well controlled resistive heat would keep the materials in pretty good shape. No super hot spots and not much oxygen in the system to eat away at the metal.
3 Likes
Probably why I have read of #10 tin cans being reused in kitchen cooking TLUDs for years without burning through. As fuel containers, they see heat, but not the full combustion heat, mostly just pyrolysis.
And it must be true. I read it on the internet 
5 Likes
Going on two years on mine. I wont hesitate to spend money on a new one and an 1 hour of my time to make a new one. Its not that big of a deal.
5 Likes
The next version Im going to make the retort and the kiln identical so that both have lids welded to the bottom. The bottom is the most subject to heat and oxidation and yes it gets eaten away at. So that is really easy to replace. They dont need to be solid welded just 1/2 inch welds around every 4 inches or so. When they go bad cut it off and put a new one on. Good to go for another year or two.
8 Likes