All you doing is changing the heat source. There will still be these same issues you wont be able to control the head presure and valve position. One of the pionts of this system is to cool the nozzle. So moving this process remotely is not desired. So you are not solving anything by move the flashing process. The flow issue is just physics not related at all to the gasifier.
Yes you are correct its fighting two issues back flow preventing fresh water getting in and also the variable water wieght head presure on a static valve position. I did increse the hole size to relieve back presure as well. So this is not as much of an issue on this build. I mentioned here because it was an issue before and the reason I openned up the hole.
Yes less intake air is what we are after. Part of the power increase is due to atmosphere displacement from thne steam injection.
Ill get it working ive done this before with the RV pump and you can just plug that in to the DC out on the genwerator so its like an auto shut off if the engine stalls.
Hey Matt,
Just thinking. Carburetors used to use a float valve to keep very even pressure to the jets. One float valve made for water would be a toilet tank valve. Another might be a live stock tank valve. I’m sure others are out there.
Rindert
Let me try the pump first. These are really cheap, work well, and can be controlled via the 12 volt charging port on the generator. Its super simple and would easier to impliment as I dont have to invent anything.
Here is one of these pumps. This one is only 16 bucks. These have built in presure switches so just like when intalled in an RV you have precise flow control via the faucet. All you have to do is add flow conttrol valve and you can then very precisely control your flow. Ive done this before so I already know I can make it do what I need it to do.
I’ll offer one last thought Matt and stand down. Appreciate you are doing it and I am just yacking about it:
So… I agree that it’s displacement either way but the intake manifold can be larger than hot zone so a given amount of water/steam changes the pressure much less for a certain closed volume of manifold. And even better, the manifold isn’t a closed volume, the intake side of the manifold is open to air and with a large diameter, much larger than the nozzle cross section. This limits backpressure because any overpressure in the manifold just vents out the front with little restriction.
The nozzle(s) see 1 ATM on the intake side and whatever partial vacuum the engine is pulling on the gasifier side, nice and steady.
Larger nozzle just changes volocity not presure. The process gasses produced besides the steam also greatly displace vacuum the volume is irelivant the gasifeir is only going to take in what it needs.
This stuff is already built tested and works; I dont need to change a thing here. The only thing I need to fix here is the water flow to the unit. This is unlreleated to the gasifier and its processes. The nozzle has already proved it is the correct size and the machine has no issue at all processing the high volume of steam introduced into it.
I think this is partly why some have issues with nozzles melting down. You dont have enough volocity to get the heat away from the end of the nozzle. The engine dont care how big that nozzle is: its going to pull the same diplacement reguardless.
Ok so I rigged up this spare pump I have for the RV. This pump was replaced with a new one after it froze in the winter here. I had to fix the brushes or do what I could to get them to slide and contact the rotor. I kept it as a spare incase this happened again. So just using it temporarilly until I get a new one as I dont trust this one.
But it is the fix, I have a constant drip now that is precisely controllable. Then the cool part is once I have the flow set you dont have to change it. You just supply power to the pump when you need to turn it on. You will never mess with that vavle once its set
Now I got to figure out what to do with the tank on the CFX it just wont look as cool without the water tank! But it will make my life way easier as Ill no longer need to produce those tanks again and especially out of stainless steel.
Fired it up at 6:45pm est. I added the hopper poker port and the water pump is doing its thing. So we shall see how long I can get this that thing to run on a full hopper load with loading. Roughly 700 to 800 ish watts.
Ok stopped the run at 8:20 so 1 hour and 35 minutes. Waiting for it to cool down a bit before openning the lid.
Yeah the water flow is surely the culprit with stability. This pump has issues it over heated when it froze it couldnt pump so the motor got a bit hot! There were at least 5 times the damb thing stalled and stopped pumping and yeah when the water stops AFR changes a LOT and it wont stay running on that fixxed setting.
However as long as that pump was working and flow set it worked. So a new pump will solve the stalling issue. I do have another pump that should be good in my old RV. I may pull it and try it. Ill have funding later this week and Ill order the proper when those funds are available.
Water consumption was about 2 - 1/2 liters. I may have been a bit optimisitic before and didnt really keep track was guessing based on memory. 2 1/2 is still quite a bit of water and impresive. But that is actual as Im using actual 2 ltr bottles for the water container.
When pump was working that thing ran very stable and strong. I used the poker port and it worked like a charm as well.
Edit: fired it back up it still has fuel just under half the hopper. Just moved the fuel to the front and refired it up at around 8:35 ish
Ok so shut her down around 9 pm. So I got another 25 minutes or so out fhis hopper. So total run time is now, 2 hours!
Hopper still has fuel above jets. Based on the hopper diameter (12 inches) , hieght and compared to five gallon bucket and also having filled it a few times now. Hopper consumption was roughly 5 gallons and thats probably being reserved 5 might over fill it.
Water consumption is now about 3 ltrs for the 2 hour run. For every gallon of water there roughly 15K BTU of hydrogen production and this is not counting the Oxygen to CO conversion, this just half that then divide by 2 its another 3.5k BTU.
Just counting the hydrogen that is 45,000 BTU added. 6 lbs (educated guess) of charcoal using 9k BTU pr lb total 54,000 BTU. So all combined 99,000 BTU per 5 gallon hopper charge. Net kw/hrs my guestimate is around 1.6 kW / hours for the 2 hour total run. So 3 lbs per 800 watts. These are really rough numbers here. Ill get more accurate numbers once I set up the ChargeVerter and get weight on this fuel and keep better track of water consumption. I think it will improve once the new pump is installed and get that working solid.
Edit I need to get a wieght on that charcoal. I may have just hit the 50/50 fuel ratio!! ( water to charcoal ratio) If I facter in the Oxygen shift the total BTU per ltr of water is 17,875 BTU roughly. X3 = 53,675 BTU per the 3 ltrs of water. This is fair because the charcoal can not form the CO without the Oxigen from the water. The bad part of this I dont have that batch to wiegh I used it all. So Ill need to make more get weight and do all this again. But the new batch should get me close enough to get a ball park figure. Im sure other runs will render better net totals. Ive done better than this and much worse. So 3 lbs pr kW/hour is promising.
Edit Again (after some research)
Well bummer those numbers are not correct. I dont remember where I got the 14375 BTU value but I dont think that is correct. I looked this up again with AI and get 5726 BTU value H2 produced from liter of water. The oxygen when converted to CO accounts for roughly hafl this. I dont know that exact number but CO is just a bit less than Hydrogen. So roughly 2866 BTU. Total 8592 BTU per every 1 liter converted to water gas. But all this is premature. The point of these test right now are just to get thing working first. lol I think we are there!
So to get to that 50/50 ratio I will need to consume slightly more than 1 ltr of water per every 1 lb of charcoal. So three 2 ltrs if my charcoal is 6 lbs per 5 gallon pale.
You know what though? You gave me an idea. Leave the steam injection as is and add a second one for the engine exhaust!! You can only supply so much water before you over cool the nozzle and then it just spits out water. There is threshold there. If I can set it just before the threshold I bet I can fit more steam into the intake.
Edit: Had another thought!! I have a second jet system that could direct inject pure steam into the core!!
Yup, been there. Somehow I made it stink like a diaper pail. Wicked sneeze.
To my mind the whole water injection thing seems like a wild goose chase. I’m focusing on EGR to optimize fuel efficiency.
If I ever get that far I’ll try to bump up compression ratio for more power, plus economy.
Rindert
It is possible to convert 100% steam to water gas. There are water gas generators. This the exact same process witth exception we are combining the combustion process inside the reactor. I am 100% positve we can push this beyond the 50/50 ratio. Ill die on this hill trying too.
This unit compared to last years test with this nozzle in the CFX is on par and is consuming roughly the same volume as the CFX did. I think the max water consumption I achieved with the CFX was around 5 liters of water. Before this nozzle with just a drip system I think maybe 2 litres per 10 gallon charge was abouit the max. Ive nearly trippled this capability with the new system.
So Im obvously going in the right direction. Need to get the steam to as high as temp as possible before entering the system.
