Wood gasification has seen limited applications across the world.
There are a few inherent disadvantages:
(1) Wood gasifiers are bulky. It looks like the only successful wood gasifier vehicles are pickup trucks, neither vehicles smaller (like a car or SUV) nor larger (a bus or semi) have practical wood gasifiers.
And you lose a bit of cargo space,which is fine for a home use pickup truck, but means lost revenue for commercial trucks.
(2) Cannot use whole wood, must chunk or pellet: the underlying reason is the low energy density of wood, plus the low volumetric efficiency of piling chunks of wood, plus wood conduct heat slowly, so a large surface area is needed in the gasifier to heat wood to the gasify temperature, which mandates chunking the wood.
(3) It costs money to grow and process wood. Wood is hard, which requires heavy duty shredder/pelletizer, which costs tens of thousands of $ to feed a fleet of commercial vehicles.
Compared to wood, trash and grass have advantages:
(1) They are softer and easier to shred down to very small particles, allowing using smaller gasifier of a fluidized bed design, more compact than our fixed-bed wood gasifiers.
(2) Trash contains plastic, which is a semi-fluid under gasifying temperature, the flow and heat conduction properties of melted trash are better than wood.
(3) Biofuel grass, such as pennisetum and switchgrass, cost less to grow, use less water, and grow faster compared to trees. Trash is negative cost, you receive $49 in average to reduce a ton of trash from landfill.
And take pictures! Everyone on here likes pictures of contraptions, even if they do not include any nice neat stacks of wood in the background!
