I agree 100% with your statement Kristijan.
Only a narrow range of conditions will produce a maximum of CH4.
Vehicle powering forces too wide of usage. And will drive the system outside of this narrow range of best CH4 conditions.
Even on small scale electrical generation the user demands will force out of best CH4 range.
A true story here:
The wife turning on two of four electric cooking stove burners to make family breakfast.
Meanwhile; oldest daughter after taking a long-hot electric water heated shower; then goes into electric high wattage hair drying blowing. Meanwhile; cold blooded Granny in her room cranks up her wall plug-in red-glow eclectic heater to warm her feet and legs.
And ALL doing this at the same time!
Ha! This is a true story from one of the big single cylinder Cut-Grid diesel guys. First he wondered why his news channel TV was voltage browning out. Then why his diesel engine was RPM loaded down: drooping voltage; not making 60 cycles; and blowing black exhaust smoke!
So he was the one to take cooking, water heating OFF electricity and onto propane.
And Granny’s electrical heat usage?? He did not say. I was afraid to ask.
Tom and Tone you remind me that heats harvesting with water off of wood combustion is a whole, another game to learn to play.
My rules of Ford Motor Company-like FAST rpm (heats-made)/high flows; from cold, system heating up cannot be depended on.
AS I was writing this I had from cold early morning; set-up and fired up my woodstove. First 2-3 pounds in 9 piece’s of fine split wood. Three layers crisscrossed. On top of a bed of crumpled news print. (bottom lite)Top covered with pieces of consumer pasteboard packaging boxes. (first hat-holding hot smoke - then self liting and smoke burning; T-LUD’ing) With ALL four stove airs wide open. Let it full roar burn down to newly made hot charcoal. 2-4 minutes. Then 5 pounds in three sticks wood on top and cut back to just 50% primary and self-drawing secondary air. 10 minutes once those fully surface flared burnt off to char; then cut back to just 20% primary air and char-glow HOT cruising hour after hour.
Your water masses as DanN.H. recently said can never be let go cold, cold or on downdraft/cross-draft systems; kills your draft flow.
Or: requires and hours re-heating time to stable conditions.
Tone nice up draft yours’s shows with the fly ash flecks in your video.
Regards
Steve Unruh
If I were building my system again I would drop two of the full size oxygen tanks about a foot down into my fire box and use the flames to heat the tanks. I’d probably still thermosyphon them with the pipe grids as well.
I think it would turn out to be an interesting option for travel and household if it was converted for spark ignition, since the fuel pumps of such engines have a lot of electronics, and the Audi ignition distributor, from a five-cylinder gasoline engine, would be very appropriate.
Hi Joni , I respect you and your work in the gasification world , you have a very well elaborated design of the gasifier , in your papers you talk about the direct C to CO transfer , how do you explain this ? What are the conditions? What do you think about the formation of methane in a gasifier? I have quoted somewhere in the literature above that charcoal is formed when cooking, as much as 17%, at temperatures below 450°C, what do you think?
I don’t know a thing or two about charcoal and its preparation, since I didn’t make or use it at all. Regarding the direct transfer of fuel carbon to CO, everything is very complicated there, but in simple words this can be explained by the fact that at high rates of air supply and the general passage of gas through the active layer, the carbon oxidation reactions do not proceed completely, there is simply not enough time for this and "unburned CO "is simply taken out of the reaction zone … It is interesting that the gas from such a gas generator has a higher content of combustible components, in contrast to the classical ones with the reduction of CO2
I was given a chemist book from l belive 1943 from my great uncle, it also breafly explains this. In it it says carbon burns with air to form CO2, but only under around 1000c. After that temperature, the reaction skips a step and instead produces CO. The molecules have so much kinetic energy that oxigen only has time to bond to carbon once.
Since you also do blacksmithing, you saw that for sure. When you get the coals hot enaugh, even with a lot of oxigen you see flames of CO gas burning, shooting out trugh the hot coals.
I also can confirm this in a gasifier. On my Mercedes l had a tiny gasifier that ran on wery water poor fuel mix, read charcoal/wood mix with a big excess of carbon. The volume of active carbon was maybee 2l, yet the car had no problem driving at 130kmh. Reason is it ran super hot! Unlike the clasical wood gasifier, where we have a oxidation and a reduction zone, this only had one zone, a reduction zone. As air got in contact with superheated carbon in imidiatly produced gas.
Do l advise doing that? No. To run a gasifier that hot means ash melts in to glass. A absolute pain to clean out!
I was just watching that video of yours the other day pulling out the slag/glass chunks out of the bottom very interesting. I wonder what temperature that system was reaching to?
Marcus, I did it in my WK Gasifier, I just put a 50: 50 ratio in of wood and Charcoal. At the grate it was 1760°f or 960.0 now that is hot. I checked my heat shields in the firetube and they were okay. But I never have done it again. Oh yes the truck ran great. And my ash/charcoal area was full going up to the drop box. It slip a lot of char and did not over pull because I had so much charcoal below and around the grate. My vaccum gage was a -30 and then some on the rails.
When I did my clean out of the ash I found ash clinkers.
Bob
Just use good old hard wood charcoal but use it 80% wood to 20% charcoal. That works good for my rocket fuel and it helps get rid of the extra moisture too. I use it dry in my WK Gasifier. Damp in my Charcoal Gasifer.
Bob
Ha!
To avoid ash melting in gas generators of this type, you need to approach the solution of the problem “inside out”!
I have been using a high-speed gas generator for a year now and I have not seen pieces of fused glass more than a pea.
Yes Joni, mine were about twice that big and not that many of them. Nothing like the glass clinkers I can make in my Charcoal Gasifer it was a Diagonal cross draft my new one is down draft and have found no clinkers yet.
Bob
So my guess is…generator, engine and gasifier under the trailer tarp. Everything water cooled and the waste heat piped into a heatexchanger for house heating. Close?
