Thanks. Did you see the full Gas Station or the Mini Gas Station?
The cyclone really is a nice place to do cooling because of the turbulent mixing.
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Yup it was running great!! Very nicely done 
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Stephen how far in do you protrude the exit pipes on your cyclones, just past the entrance or do you have it flush with the plate it’s welded to?
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Well, I don’t have a grinder for the charcoal so I improvised. I had some expanded steel laying around and thought this would be a quick alternative. I think if the openings were a little smaller, it would be ideal. If my 14 year old helper wasn’t so aggressive, the pieces don’t bounce as much. We got 20 gallons in a half hour.
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Bill,
I also use expanded metal, pushing it through with my shoes. The working area limited by a 2 x 4 frame. That way my head is well above the dust. Recently, I have arranged a sloping 1/8 inch screen underneath the expanded metal so I can eliminate the fines at the same time.
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Fashion a pair of three, or four-bladed “ice skates” to walk on the charcoal over the grate to speed things up.
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As some of you know, I made a charcoal gasifier for my Polaris Sportsman 400 and 9000W generator. It performed well. One of the things I don’t like about it is with the fluted nozzle is that when the charcoal went halfway down in the hopper, I couldn’t make gas anymore.
So here’s my thoughts. What if I place the nozzle on the side and face them towards the center? My guess is I may be able to use about ⅔ of the hopper of charcoal then?
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I think they all do this and I have no idea why either. This is why Im changing the CFX and inverting the intake out output ports. The intake port will now be placed as the very bottom and the exhaust port will be raise up to about the level of where the intake port was on the earlier versions. This will lower the reaction zone allowing for more fuel to be consumed pr hopper load. It should also help with flow biasing to the front as well.
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On my 55 gall drum gasifier my nozzle was vertical from the bottom around 4 inches off the bottom , it performed well for over 5 years , best i could manage before over heat and weak gas was maybe 2 /3rds that still left a run time of over 4 hours pulling around 7KW .
Dave
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The other thing i noticed on the flute was slag building up on the holes and eventually plugging them. My thoughts are if the reaction zone is off the side of the nozzle, the slag will drop in the middle of the hopper.
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I dont think it will matter, the slag is always going to build up local to the nozzle entrance into the machine. Gravity can only do so little as there will be fuel / charcoal packed around it as it forms so no matter what its going to form and stay put around the nozzle holes.
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Could the loss of good gas making at low charcoal remaining stack, be due to loss of upwards heat containment?
Steve Unruh
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I vaguely remember one of the Russian visitors to the forum made an updraft that exits the gas halfway down the reactor, and cools the gas like one would with any other gasifier.
Edit: I think it was to mitigate/prevent CO changing or accumulating into CO2. Though if you did this, you’d have a turn down ratio just like any other gasifier.
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I have no idea. I was thinking that maybe as the hopper becomes vacant the Co2 could be migrating into that void and then building up overwhelming the reaction making a Co2 rich gas. But I have no equipment to confirm this.
Maybe this is both as the loss of heat containment will help migrate that Co2 prematurely and from entering the reaction zone.
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