I got pretty good speeds with my flute nozzle updraft in the Mazda. I would still be using it if it didn’t get goobered up when I landed upside down in a wreck.
I never got to really test the full speed but the highest I got was 55mph in 4th gear.
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And you say you cannot prove this.
You need to prove it or find a different mechanism that explains the carbon.
Here is why.
Three quarters of the heat released when oxidizing carbon is the C+O->CO+3/4 total heat reaction. The last quarter is CO+O->CO2+1/4 total heat. For reversion to happen an oxygen atom will have to gain back that 3/4 heat and more in order to free itself from the carbon. Then it has to pick either a carbon or a CO. Things always seek the lowest energy level.
I say we are out of oxygen and we have something attached to a carbon that doesn’t have a lot of energy involved in the bond. Or we simply have excess carbon, and being that it isn’t diatomic, it’s slipping past everything.
What about C-N? That would be a weak unstable bond.
Anyhow, this bears research. I want to see proof. I have heard this like an urban legend for years, but cannot find anything in the Linde or Airgas data sheets.
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Hi BruceJ.
Is observed phenomena an acceptable proof?
Let me give you two:
The SNAP off the end of a bull whip. We now know it is a mini-sonic boom. And now know that energized air micro-locally gets real HOT.
Another for your diesel heart. Wet sleeves pin holing eroding through over time. A prevalent especially GMC/Detroit 2-sroke problem. The in cylinder combustion events (Detroit’s X2) percussively creating a micro-bubbles on the wet cylinder walls outer surface. An energized HOT micro-bubble. That bubble each time collapsing taking some metal with it. Back-in-the-day Detroit’s had a specail spin on conditioning filter for their coolant so’s those engines could match Cummins service life’s.
No maths could predict these. Later, explain a bit.
So the sonic turbulences off the edge of a fast flowing throttle plate . . . that is converted made energy too. The energy to satisfy your reversion equation?
Or maybe the soots buildup’s just behind the throttle plates is turbulences mechanically jammed together carbons accumulations, eh?
Regards
Steve unruh
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That is one of the best posts/rebutles I have read in ages here…
I also agree on the need for proof and the only proof i can offer is that co is not all that stable so its looking for a reason to decompose.
CO wants to bond to something ( like iron or nickel ) or oxidize.
What will it do if there is enough energy in latent heat but no metal or Oxygen to bond with?
Questions for a chemist.
Mr Mond would have an answer…
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Steve,
I must gently remind you that it was the IH 7.3idi that had the cavitation coolant issues. Regardless, it was destructive, and mechanical energy was doing physical chemistry.
The throttle plate stuff. I think it’s a snow fence type fluid dynamics example. The place behind the throttle plate is a pressure drop, and the carbon is falling out.
Think of Carbon as a tetrahedron. Four triangles. At the apex where three of the triangles come together sits the highest probability that an electron will be found. Now here comes this big demanding oxygen atom. It wants two electrons. In fact, it can park it’s big ass in the middle of the face of one of Carbon’s triangles and have access to a high probability of sharing not just two electrons but three. So at any given time, the oxygen feels complete with eight electrons. That is a Carbon monoxide molecule.
Now here comes another oxygen atom. It also wants two electrons. It has a problem though. It cannot balance on any of the three remaining faces without being too close to the other oxygen atom. So it settles on a face and locks in one carbon electron, but ends up sharing all of them. Its not as low an energy level, and definitely not as strong a bond, because the electrons are spread out so far from any one nucleus. This is carbon dioxide.
With this visualization in mind, you can see why I struggle with how the heck a single oxygen strongly bonded to a carbon, would ever casually let go, only to form a weaker bond with a carbon monoxide molecule.
Even if you tried aligning two carbon triangle faces together so that two carbon monoxide molecules could share electrons, you end up with two carbons sharing at an apex, and the oxygens at opposite ends of the molecule. Not exactly conducive to stripping off a carbon.
I forgot to add that carbon either wants four electrons or wants to give four electrons. That’s why it’s so incredible at making diverse molecules.
I remember Jim APL said that a tank of carbon monoxide would revert just sitting there, under pressure. I suppose an experiment would be to get the tare weight of the cylinder at 0psig and fill it with CO, let it sit. Then release it, then reweigh. If the tare weight went up slightly, then one could expect there was solid carbon in the tank.
Anyhoo, I better get to bed.
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How does a gas producer make tar?
On the topic of charcoal efficiency, here’s what I did recently to capture the energy from the combustion of tars, in the process of producing charcoal:
I’m also thinking of just skipping the metal pail and scooping out the big pile of embers before they completely burn out. It’s not hard to discern the burn, to know when. And I think there would be more than a 5 gallon pail worth each time.
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I always thought it made tar from the system not running hot enough to vaporize it. Tar sweats out of the wood and steams up, goes through the char bed. The active zone needs to be hot enough to vaporize it.
At least that’s the way I’ve read it.
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I think the tars are supposed to “crack.” That is, they actually burn to form CO2 and H20, and lots of heat. From there, the red (I should say, white) hot charcoal contributes the necessary C to get CO and H2. More happening than just heating liquid to vapor phase.
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Maybe I should rephrase.
When a gas producer makes tar, how does it do it?
I have built some excellent tar makers. How is the tar made and how does it get into the engine?
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When there’s not enough heat to crack the tars. They simply go from liquid to vapor, and exit the gasifier without cracking. Then when they hit cooler parts of the system, they go back from vapor to liquid, and even to solid once they lose enough volatiles and start to oxidize. Then you have that hard crusty stuff that plugs intakes and stops valves from closing.
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Oh I should say this – the tar is in the wood already as lignin. It’s not “made” per se, it comes out of the wood as a product of pyrolizing.
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And of course catalysts for cracking lignin can be found… Like here is some newer research on a Nickel-iron catalyst…
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Interesting link Sean. I’ve been interested and frustrated by what catalysts can do to improve gasification and related processes (e.g. Fischer–Tropsch).
Somehow the catalyst is always difficult to prepare, easily fouled and/or exotic/expensive.
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I’m not sure it was that helpful, I didn’t pull the article out of sci-hub to read it.
fischer-tropsch is a phd program and is assembling molecules. 
And this is a catalyst to break the lignin chains to it’s respective monomers, and really to get benefit other then just not having tar, you need to crack those too.
But looking to see what cracks those, I ran into this, which is a really good detail of what is happening at the chemical level when we are talking about cracking tars… And yes I don’t expect anyone to read and understand it without eyes glazing. Skim and look at the pretty pictures and note the temperatures, etc. But the general idea is lignin is chain. In the first step, break that down to the individual links (which are rings). The second step is to crack those rings open.
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Great link but you are right, it is very dense!
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Yeah, that paper is loaded. I skimmed through parts… 
This is why Char-gasing is so much easier!
From what I could gather, lignin is tricky because it has an intermediate decomposition stage that likes to reform back into tars and other nastiness rather than produce fully to CO and H2. Higher temperatures help and some catalysts help.
If a person had a downdraft wood gasifer they might have an insulated chamber below the hearth with enough volume to increase dwell time for the wood gas to react with a catalyst and enough insulation to keep things hot as the paper suggests. It could be a “hot filter” even - filters and catalysts both like lots of surface area.
Something like that an ability to swap catalyst media in and out would allow for a lot of experimentation with different materials. You could bunch up stainless steel wool or mesh, see about sintering Prussian blue onto it, etc. Iron, Nickel, Carbon and compounds of each seem to be prospects. Stainless would have a mix of all three depending on the alloy.
Again… the preparation of catalysts is so difficult I think a backyard scientist is best served trying a bunch of cheap and easies hoping for something that works. Run the gasifier in “tar mode”, put the resulting gas through the hot filter with a variety of potential backyard catalysts then check to see if anything seems to help crack the tars.
Even that may be aiming too simple. It seems from the paper the lignin problem may need to be solved right in the gasification zone because otherwise the lignin has already made a mess. I don’t have a great idea there. That’s a pretty limited space at the point of gasification as it’s carved out of the fuel itself by the action of the nozzles. Even worse a certain minimum gas velocity is necessary thus dwell time of the gas is low at that stage. Any effort to break up lignin and tars past that active gasification zone may be too late? Well the hot filter-catalyst idea may be worth a try but it’s a bit of a long shot.
Right so… back to char-gas!
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Hey fellows I tried to find and put up links to two close to me in-Oregon Cellulosic-to-Fuels making plants.
One was on the lower Columbia River in the early 2000’s. They did make woodchips into liquid fuels. Using a thermal set of systems. They went bankrupt when then President George Bush II shut down the alternatives $1.00 a gallon Federal subsidy on bio-to-fuels.
The other was on the mid-Columbia River and shut down recently in the last 3-4 years. Chinese initiated system. U.S. Federal partially funded. They were using a biological and combined heat-pyrolysis system. Thier biological source was from termite intestinal flora. They continually failed to meet needed minimum production volumes to be financial viable. And the sources development $'s pockets stop supporting them after a decade of “Tomorrows”.
Yeah. Go with what can be made happen today. Imperfect as it is.
Regards
Steve Unruh
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You are so right Steve. The Know How Now works good. We just need to put it all together in a package that will work for each individuals needs. Just making sure the vehicle is compatible.
Like trying to use it on my 2003 Dodge 4.7 L engine is a waste of time. But the 5.2, 5.9, 8.0 L V-8 engines for Dodge are good choices. Especially the MPFI 1992 to 1995 vehicles with OBD1 systems.
Bob
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