I was wondering…I saw some people making charcoal in a retort and it seems to create alot of oil (or wood viniger) and I was wondering if u can make fuel from it with thermal cracking?
So how would u do this on a bigger scale?let’s say like 250gallons of vinegar a day…I’ll check out ur page…thank u very much
keywords,: fractional distillation, controlled fermentation, catalystic conversion…
I am just a small “nutty professor” researcher/teacher
Reading, studying and above all DOING experiments…
My clips are not fabricated/staged, just recordings of things done, for reference.
If i somehow proof that it can be done, the people willing to learn will study how i did this and not just copy/do what and how i tell them to do.
A gasifier does just that… it is a thermal cracker…
Im considering getting one of the Yanmar Clone engines to do this with. Make the 20% synthetic diesel from the retort gas and create the other 80% gas from a charcoal gasifier unit. I can then turbo this gas as it is clean enough to do so.
You can also use the heat for creating synthetic diesel / kerosene from plastics.
Siberia is burning , Canada is burning , California is burning , Arizona is burning . I heard a third of of our forest will die and could burn . You can not put a price on that . We have sent Hundreds of millions perhaps billions of dollars trying to make liquid fuel from wood and as soon as they fill the quota for grant They shut down . There are biomass power plants working with forestry preventing forest fires not getting a dime because they do not produce a liquid fuel . Ensyn is getting the renewable fuel money from EPA for producing bio-diesel that can not be used as bio-diesel so they sell it as boiler oil .
Matt I have one of those Chinese Yammer clones the middle size 11 hp I think in a case ingersoll 448 garden tractor. Those motors seem a little expensive at the moment I would expect to see them around $450 IIRC from about a year ago when a friend asked me about them. They are tough as nails motors. The case ingersoll garden tractor is easy to repower with one because all you need to do is mount the hydraulic pump to the motor and it will drive around and pull things. The front pto would need more work but I didn’t need that for what I use it for.
I highly recommend those motors mine has taken alot of abuse for about 7 years here on the farm. The only issue I have had was a bad injector and a new one was cheap. That little tank on those will also run it at full load for hours. It is amazing how little fuel the air cooled diesels burn.
I have found these guys that seems to have a ready made solution to turn wood into diesel…Technology — Proton Power, Inc.
That is not diesel, they make woodgas but give it another name… ( its actual retort gas )
They run it with a diesel engine as dual fuel…
Hope this is not too fare off topic but when proton power was mention it rang a bell.
In 2014 I was asked to come up to Oak Ridge Tn to show off my truck and tour the proton power site.
Standing in the foreground in the picture is Sam Weaver the head of proton power. He and a couple of his engineers have seen near 80 mph on woodgas
The video is just a short clip of driving there .
I have a 1967 John Deere 110 that this should nearly direct swap with the stock 8 hp kohler.
So that is the plan. Nice to hear someone with first hand experience. Id like to play with converting one to spark ignition. Do you happen to know the CR of this engine.
Sorry I really don’t know the specs. I bought mine off craigslist about 2005 someone had a warehouse full of them and listed thousands of them on craigslist they bought them because the world was going to end in 2000. Lol. Guess 5 years later they realized that the world didn’t end and storage was expensive. I think I paid $300 for it shipped to my door. Ironically it wouldn’t do a direct swap where i wanted and it sat for a few more years before i finally installed it. A friend of mine wanted to swap it with a Kohler but never did. IIRC the shaft is the same but the bolt pattern is different. If I have some time later I will see if I can’t find the specs for these again I had them about a year ago now.
I can tell you that pull start takes a real man. I honestly have tires a few times and I don’t think I have ever pulled it fast enough. I decided it was just easier to go get the jumper cables.
What would be really cool is machine this with a spark plug revision. Keep the diesel system in tact, set up an LP / NG system, carburetor set up for ethanol and then turbo it with adaption for charcoal or direct woodgas. Mate this to a 5 -10 kW gen head, and you have a power system that will run on literally anything.
I bet with the turbo other fuels will run at much higher outputs. I could then run this on all kinds of fuel or a combination. Ill design a controller to automatically mix different fuel mixtures and as I suspected this little motor will run for ever and ever. lol
looks around I don’t think you are nutty.
Are you just taking the bamboo vinegar and doing fractional distillation or are you also doing a thermal cracking step? I assume you have tried both.
My understanding was that the vinegar portion was the middle layer after it settled, so are you using that layer or using the lower layer? (Or Did I missunderstand?)
Those Chinese diesels are tough but I think they are pretty much a disposable unit. You can buy parts but IIRC the major engine parts seemed pricey compared to the entire engine and not worth repairing beyond simple things.
If I wanted to go deep into turbo and other options i might look for a Lambardini which where used on Pasquali tractors and saw mills.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lomdardini-1-Cylinder-horizontal-shaft-diesel-motor-engine-/323958953625
Something like that they are now made by Kohler but they are the same engines with modern emmisions. Basically they are a deutz diesel engine made in Italy instead of Germany best I could tell rebuilding the one in my pasquali which is a 2 cylinder air cooled diesels. Having both I think the Lambabrini or the Deutz are a better design for rebuilding then the Chinese ones. But they are also much more expensive. We had a Deutz 6 cylinder air cooled diesel in a 100 hp Same tractor when I was a kid. That motor was indestructible. The rest of the tractor not so great.
Anyway that is my two cents I would quicker consider the Chinese diesels a rugged motor but I wouldn’t plan on rebuilding it.
I was just thinking there is an allis Chalmers lawnmower that has a lambabrini or Deutz diesel I forgot which one or what the model is but they pop up on craigslist from time to time. Might even be a garden tractor which really just means bigger rear wheels. From what I can tell.
If I were to mass produce this Im sure I could get parts as I would become a distributor. This would not be a one time build it would be developmental then market research and brought to market if all could fall in place. The cost of the Kohler is an absolute no, Kohler products are all over priced and are junk. I will never ever buy products made by Kohler.
In mass production you are correct you can order either a the typical Chinese diesels or the Deutz from China cheap as a distributor the only catch is handling the importing. I almost went that route to order a group of 5 or 10 at one point but decided it was just too much headache for the one time order. I wanted to do a replacement on farmall H tractors and had access to 5 tractors between a few friends but it fell apart because non of us wanted to do the import. So my H sits today still waiting for me to decide what to do. And how to pay for it.