Converting a car to run on wood energi stored in "liquid" form possible?

Hi all you that are making cars and trucks run without the need of normal forms of fuel we use today. It’s amazing how far we have gone in the past 100 years of making crazy and amacing machines to do our jobs. (dishwashers, advanced air travel, food production) But the sad thing is how blind we are to how fragile we are when fuel, food or even wi fi is gone.

I’m not going to keep this up and ask what I like to know. Only due to how fail proof wood power is and the knowlage we all lack: You have managed to keep the ide for normal peaple to not be dependent on fossil fuel and I applaud and respect you for doing just that. The ones with the energi got the world power in reality. I’m not good or knowlaged about making a attraption like your’s. But loved to have a off grid power sorce anyone can handle. And learning and perecting it can save me some money and don’t feel bad about it.

What most of you do is connect the “wood gas” directly to the engine forcing you to take with you the hole thing on the vehicle. It is kind of cool to go down the street with it and all. But is “wood gas” possible to store as a liquid like a normal fuel tank on a car? Making the car modifyed to only run on it?

Acting like a normal car and no need to fire up a gas generator on the car before going is something I loved to have as a hobby. I find nothing about this on internet why this is not possible to do. Isn’t it only a weaker gasoline injected to the engine? Taking a old car or tracktor change the air mixture got to be enuf. Or what is wrong with that? I thing the old car die before it is hurt by the fuel type. And cheap old car is easy to get your hands on.

The liquid stored in the car have to be enuf to run quite a way before needing more “wood fuel” and having the “wood fuel” made at home the past 5 or so days can’t be that hard when you get into it. It need to be high quality and allot of work put into it to run as normal fuel. But can a simple human get away with not building a car with a fire in the back of the car? I don’t find that to be my task in life to make. Sorry ;/ I still like the ide of Driving On Wood. Give a idiot like me a reason to not drop this ide. I understand the hole ide of “wood gas” but like to get input from you that know a thing or 2 about it. I got the feeling from reading online that “wood gas” can’t be stored for some reason. But 24h needs to be possible in liquid form. Yes? And for all I have heard the amount of wood needed is not that bad.

Give me the reality picture before doing more digging on how I possibly can create a wood gas generator. Thanks!

PS: Sorry I don’t know what to call this kind of power form but “wood gas” :smiley:

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But isn’t the gas turning into liquid form after cooling down?

Or am I missing something? Watching some videos pointing at wood fuel tanks being uset on there trucks?
I know about some are trying to make water into a power sorce. The fuel I’m thinking about is wood alcohol more or less that can be uset to power a combustion engine. .

Have I got it all wrong?

Hi Johan

Read the entire topic Dan proposed. Or google Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

In short, this is s proces that chemicaly turns wood to woodgas to synthetic gasoline. It does work, it has been done a lot by the nazis, l have played with it, but l lost interast mainly becouse it isnt economical for me. A bucket of wood will drive me for 50 km on woodgas. A bucket of wood converted to synthetic gasoline will at the very most drive me for 10 km, 5km more realisticly.
Koen Van Looken does something connected to this topic but dont kniw the numbers he is getting.
Actualy, as for water made in to fuel, we do that too :smile: wood gasification is mainly reacting superhot steam with superhot charcoal to form CO and H2.

Wood its self is already a great sorce of ccompressed gas.

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Hi Johan, if changing wood into a more portable package is your goal consider a wood powered gasifier and possibly charging an electric car. Efficiency would probably still be better then liquifying the gas. Just my opinion of course.
David Baillie

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Hi Dan, Johan,

Running a “gasifier” at home, modified for producing the wanted Woodalcohol aka Methanol, is possible.
Once you build your home set, providing you the heat and electricity for your house, you can extract about 15% from the gas into Alcohol. The rest can be used in generating heat and power for your home.
You only need to convert the vehicle from gasoline into alcohol

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But with that said, it’s still going to be technically quite complex and challenging to produce a liquid fuel with a home based system. It seems likely that such a system will require exceptional technical expertise and time for direct monitoring to operate such a system.

As Kristijan has described in his thread I believe, the Fisher Tropsch process is also technically achievable, but probably only if you have a degree in chemistry or equivalent abilities.

I understand that Koen has possibly made some breakthroughs in developing a small methanol production unit, but the results of his advanced work are so far proprietary.

So for practical purposes, efficiency and labour, I believe wood or charcoal gasification are the options. On the vehicle side charcoal will be the most like a liquid fuel, simpler gasification and gas treatment, lighter weight, but with greater work and energy losses to produce the fuel.

Regards,

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Hi Johan, welcome to the site. Your question is quite common, we even have it on the FAQ:

http://www.driveonwood.com/library/faq/#compressed

We like to say that the woodgas is already compressed very nicely, in wood pieces. The gasifier just releases those “stored” gases on demand, using heat and thermochemical conversion.

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This is something similar, but too bulky for transportation. N2 free wood gas - #9 by MikeR

From other point - lets go wild and design an gasifier to work on charcoal-water slurry.

On low-tech side - plain charcoal gasifier + instead of recycled gas or steam for cooling, lets spray small amount of slurry + preheat air to help vaporizing water. It will spray and will give better distance than plain gasifier. How to calculate this - i do not know for sure.