As I’ve said before, Tone did all the hard work his gasifier will ever require while building it, now all he has to do is feed it.
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Well put Kristijan, my chunk/chopper is different too. To chunk hard knoty not straight cherry wood branches because of the pruning of the trees. It works for the designed use. For the big pieces that can not be chunked they beome charcoal in my retort. Find your wood fuel source and figure a way to make it work for you.
And also what all the others have said too. Great descussion and information for everyone.
Bob
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I thought I would put this here for those who might be thinking on wood gasiftcation on wood chips and all the automation that is required. That is one big gasifier with electrical motors running the chips feeders. To just run a very small generator. Heck the power of the generator has to run the electrical parts of the gasifier too. Not much left to run anything else. Right.
Bob
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Looks a little to pricey for this poor boy. I don’t know what stackless means either. Is it some kind of Drizzler?
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No, I looked for his other video s. Different pieces on top of each other. And I think he mentioned up draft somewhere. He started with real big chunks and at the end it was chips……
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Too small for you! You are in the big money poplar biomass coppicing game! You need something bigger!
Just fin case you didn’t know, you can clone poplars from cuttings. it isn’t hard. 
(I posted this video because I think it is funny the tractor with the trailer kept getting stuck and was towed at one point. )
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Yes this is what people shuld do more. not the biodiesel and bioethanol nonesence…
There was this guy at Argos, forgot the name. Educated fellow, phd etc… who came to the meeting as a buisness oppertunity. Still got his card somewhere… anyway, he sayd that tree farming makes no sence, low yeald per hectare, photosinthesis low efficiancy, blah blah… and that solar cells are the way to go. As far as lm concerned, if l got to pick between investing milions in a solar farm, keeping panels clean and fearing them get damaged from hail and wind, and then dealing with all the waist when they expire, vs puting a few sticks in the ground and combine the growth every few years guess what lm gonna pick…
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The major benefit to tree farming is there’s many industries that are willing to buy your crop as well. Lumber, paper, particle/chip board, firewood, charcoal, animal bedding, garden mulch, Christmas Trees.
I’ve been wanting to clone my Japanese Maple and start selling saplings, I’ve heard they’re worth quite a bit.
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It depends on the market and the variety. You can start some of them from cuttings but some don’t do well with cuttings, so you do grafting. It can be a rabbit hole.
Most landscaping plants, It takes like 3-7 years to get something to sell because most people don’t want to buy twigs they want a bush that looks good now. If you are patient, and keep your eye out, usually there is very little reason to buy landscaping plants. Most people aren’t patient.
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Can any one help explain to me how add water to chacoal add more energy ?
But why cant we do it with wood gasifier.
Have anyone measure tar content in wood gasifier vs charcoal gasifier ?
from my opinion wood gasifier is chacoal gasifier with chacoal maker stack on top of it.
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When you add water to charcoal, you are basically adding a process to produce “water gas” This is a simple process of introducing steam into a hot carbon bed that results in the carbon water shift. Where the carbon steals the oxygen away from the H2 and combines to make CO while leaving the H2 behind.
A wood gasifier already has an abundance of moisture. There is both chemically bound and natural water both released in combustion process. You can only process so much water as this is an exothermic reaction. Too much it will cool to much and crash the reaction process. Tar and soots are also cracked in the same way, so you must have excess thermal energy for that process.
If there is too much water and it gets past the reaction zone. No big deal just water that gets in your engine. If tar gets past the reaction zone; well then you will be yanking the head off, pully valves, cleaning valve guides and valve stems, changing oil and then putting it all back together.
Wood gasification works well on large engines as they can drive the gasifier to the temps required to crack tar along with a mild water shift. If the gasifier can sustain these reactions then they will have consistent operation.
Where as charcoal is better suited for small engines as a small engine can drive the charcoal gasifier to required reaction temperature much easier than a wood gasifier. The charcoal gasifier in general will have an open reaction zone without restrictions so fuel flows are not restricted. Modern small engines have much tighter tolerances than the old ones. So they have very little tolerance (if any) to overcome tar production. So the end result is a system that will have much high self sustaining operation and tar issues are much less likely and with a good water injection system the gas will have higher energy density as this is also displacing nitrogen with steam and the also displacing the intake with the newly formed H2 and CO.
Those that refer to a wood gasifier having a charcoal gasifier inside need to stop. This is not true a wood gasifier does not oxidize the charcoal bed. The internal processes are not the same.
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Matt, you wrote well, but I can’t agree with the last paragraph, because I notice in my wood gasifier that charcoal forms already high above the top row of nozzles, there is almost always charcoal at least 10 cm above the nozzles. I believe that the heat itself radiates from the hot zone so high that “coal cooking” takes place so high, well, we can also call it pyrolysis. As far as I understand this process, oxygen and hydrogen atoms are supposed to be released separately here, but they bind to water only in the combustion process, this is not chemically bound water, because this process provides energy, which in turn heats the wood nearby and thus the pyrolysis process it reaches quite high below the top of the hopper. Oxygen is added exclusively to the coal for the formation of CO, which at the same time provides energy for the reduction process of pyrolysis gases (tar gas and water vapor), but if you look at the location of the lower center nozzle, you can see that it is always located in fine coal and ash.
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Bottom line is the processes are not the same. A wood gasifier is not processing the same gases and the process is much more complex. You may see charcoal at the nozzle after it has cooled but under operation there is always fresh unprocessed wood entering the oxidation zone producing Pyrolysis gases. The oxidation zone is an entire process above the reduction zone there is the restriction zone below this and then the reduction zone. A Charcoal gasifier only has the oxidation process is it directly and localized in the reduction zone.
The processes are similar like a diesel engine verses a gasoline engine. But these gasification technologies are not the same and we need to stop trying to make them sound the same. They are not the same.
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Think I see what you are talking about by the time the raw wood is fully finished into charcoal above the grate in a wood gasifier it has had tars being cracked being made into gases, wood gases in a reduction zone with reduced air reaction, moisture and high temps. In a charcoal gasifier using finished charcoal that has already been made into engine grade charcoal, it is ready to go with no tars. So yes the charcoal making is different. In a wood gasifier the tars are going with into the hot charcoal lobe and being cracked. Where this is not so in a charcoal gasifier, unless you burn brands or raw wood in your charcoal gasifier then you have a wood gasifier proscess fuction going on. Also there is a lack of extra water in a charcoal gasifier and by adding water this is beneficial to making water gas production as stated above.
So if I only have charcoal for fuel in my wood gasifier. It now is a charcoal gasifier in the way it is process the fuel.
But if I mix any wood in the charcoal in my charcoal gasifier it will change my process on how the gasifier operates because now there are tars present in the pyorlysis of making charcoal that need to be cracked and turned into wood gases.
I have never thought of this before in this way.
Bob
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When I think of the char bed of wood gasifier, I am thinking of the reduction zone and the reduction zone only. A proper built Imbert the oxygen is spent long before it gets here and there is no oxidation process here. A charcoal gasifier the oxidation process is localized and directly in the char bed. Then the fuel break down from the top of the hopper to the gas exit are quite a bit different and there are different reactions occurring as you mentioned.
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Tone, by adding a bit more oxygen doesn’t your small nozzle in the reduction zone kind of break down the charcoal and the water a bit more than regular wood gasifier and make it act like a charcoal gasifier so there’s nothing but small pieces of charcoal and ash left, like a charcoal gasifier?
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I think that it’s because of Tone’s design with the bottom and top ring of nozzles that he is finding finished char that high above the nozzles. The heat in that area is not enough to break down the molecules into CO but with the added Oxygen from those top nozzles there is enough heat to carbonize the wood. Size of the fuel would seem to be important here as well. I can’t see this happening with golf ball size chunks.
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I do not know about a Imbert gasifiers, but I know you can over pull on a WK Gasifier. The preheated air coming out of the nozzles is making it to the grate, which at this point you are in heater mode and are burning up your gases you have made. At this point you will notice a lost of power to the engine in the form of what we call weak gases. At the grate you will see the temps. at 1760 °f and rising quickly.
But in the normal operations zones at the grate 1630 °f you are making very good gases. I think the air is all burned up just below the restriction opening where everything speeds up in velocity and the frequency increases and then drops quickly in change in this area.
I would love to put a themocoupling in this spot. I am sure it is 2000 °f and up.
Bob
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A gasifier is a device that turns solid fuel into gas, if we gasify coal, we must add oxygen to form CO and this can be called oxidation, albeit incomplete. But when we gasify wood, we know that it contains, in addition to carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, where theoretically these elements should be sufficient by themselves for a complete conversion, we would only initiate the necessary reaction by introducing a certain amount of energy and maintain it without losses. In this case, the oxidation of hydrogen and oxygen, as well as carbon, takes place again, which releases so much energy that the reduction process can continue. However, since in reality heat losses occur during the process, we must cover them by burning (oxidizing) charcoal, and remove excess water vapor from the process. Based on the gases produced during the real operation of the wood gasifier (H2, CH4 and CO), we can easily conclude that the energy that enables the gasification process is generated by the oxidation of carbon into CO.
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Very good write up Matt.
I’ll try to be more precise in the future 
Yeah, a wood gasifier doesn’t usually have a ‘charcoal gasifier’ inside, as though they were two distinct machines that are neatly separated.
Unless you are running with the hopper lid open, then that is exactly what you are doing.
The general point was that all gasifiers that try for tar free ‘engine grade’ gas rely on glowing charcoal for reduction. This charcoal can be generated in the gasifier or created externally. I hope that part was clear.
I think this illustrates some of the challenges of wood gasification.
Yes, an ideal wood gasifier burns the tar for process heat, not charcoal, but it’s never that neat.
WK and monorator builds condense a portion of the tar instead of burning it. This is polite and socially responsible, but identical in effect to operating with the hopper lid open; separate the char making from the gasification by removing the water and tar.
With a wood gasifier, light load is char making (danger of tar), heavy load, the charbed is consumed (danger for your nozzles and grate).
Get the superficial velocity right and you have ideal tar burning processes, but with varying load, this is a constantly moving target.
Even when things are perfect a portion of the charcoal is going to oxidize.
Oil drip in a charcoal gasifier like GGilmore did… process heat is supplied in part by oil.
However the heat and CO2 and steam are generated, all gasifiers that try to produce tar free gas use glowing charcoal to produce CO and H2, and in that limited sense, all gasifiers are charcoal gasifiers 
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