Tom. you made me feel so guilty after that almighty dollar post that i went ahead and moved the S-10 into the work area of my shop today.
I’m not quite ready to race you to completion though, especially after you changed your plans on all your new ideas. I’ll have to say though that fall is a perfect time to work in the shop temperature wise,-not too hot - not too cold.
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I will be rooting for all three teams.
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You can get arrested for that in ALabama…no wait, that’s college football…sorry
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Don, I’m building a gasifier of the Simple Fire design for a vehicle and am considering filter options. Do I understand correctly that other than the cyclone filters, you only use a 30 gallon drum filled with hay? That sounds too simple to be true. If there is more to your filtering. Please describe. Thanks.
Steve,
If you haven’t already, read through the great filter discussion “What kind of filter media?” under General Discussion
Yes Steve it is as simple as that. The charcoal in the hopper acts as the first filter as the gas rises thru it. The cyclones spin out the fine particles and some dust and the straw in the barrel plus one and a half inches of open cell foam above the straw is the final filter.
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My two cents-- I would stick with any hay or grass-- straw has glazed stalks that probably won’t hold soot as well and for sure not moisture-- not that you will have any with charcoal. TomC
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I have been using straw in a laundry bag with about 8’’ of ss scrub pads in a wire basket on top.
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I used grass hay at first but it packed and seemed to glue together when it got moist and would not breathe like I thought it should. Straw does not have that problem and it seems to collect soot on the moist surfaces and when I drained the water out of the bottom it drained out black water which makes me think it worked ok.
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Hi Don, the wild oats that grows around my place is working great also, the stocks are very similar to straw. I notice the same thing when dumping my water and the oat straw washes out clean and does not pack down like the grass hay did. Also I can use more for filtering.
Bob
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And don’t forget about wool. Old wool blankets are fairly easy to come by and according to Austrailian research near the end of WW2, was pretty effective in trapping dust.
Gary in PA
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Hi Gary, do you think wool could be used for filtering just after the cyclone filter on a gasifier? Or would you have to cool the gas down first.
Bob
The wool GaryG is referring to is animal sheeps wool.
The fibers on these are hollow.
The surface of these fibers have many, many overlapping shingled pores.
Sheeps wool had the highest heat resistance of all common natural fibers.
How high? My wood stove surface in full roar will be ~400F. No problem for wool clothing brushing up against this.
Sheeps wool will burn; but it seems to take at least 600F to get it to even smoulder. Wool fiber yarn is listed as suporting open combustion “burning” at 1100F/600C.
Regards
tree-farmer Steve Unruh
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Raw wool is about $10 per pound, which overfills a 5 gallon bucket. Oxyclean is a pretty good detergent for tar. Hmmm?
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From a filter media suppliers webpage:
Wool felts are naturally flame resistant. Although they will burn when exposed to an open flame, when the flame is removed the felt will extinguish itself
Wool felts remain unchanged in physical properties as it wears
Can be hard enough to turn on a lathe and also soft enough to be sewn
Wool felts do not ravel or fray
Highly absorbent and uninjured by continued oil/lubricant saturation
Significant resiliency
Wool felt is an excellent insulator against cold, heat, sound and vibration.
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I’ve used wool blanket material in my final filters. Works good
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Hi Don.
I have a couple of questions. You mention you set your water drip to about 2 drops per second. Does this amount remain constant all the time or do you adjust depending on load? Did you determine 2 drops/s is optimal for performance or gas dryness or something else? I ask becouse it seems a small amount. I used that much water in my 50cc moped runing on chargas.
You do not use exhaust reintake on your sistem?
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Hi Kristijan,
I start out at 2 drops a second (just a guess-not using a stop watch) and then watch the temperature readouts. when the temps go up I give it more water. Most of my trips are 45 minutes or less. The temps go higher after shut down than when running. I never tried exhaust gas on the Geo Tracker, just on my lawn mower.
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Thank you. Do you reduce your water drip when you idle?