Hi Koen missed you too.
Anyhoo, I recently learned that a lime based scrubber will remove CO2 as well as sulfur. It would seem that such a scrubber could take ANY producer gas system to the next level. Your comments/ opinion?
Rindert
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Thanks Koen, miss you too.
What about stage 1? What would you recomend?
Friends, whether this is just theoretical thinking, compressing gas to high pressure, cooling it and storing it in a cylinder for later use is an excellent choice IF:
-you have a high pressure compressor and cleaned gas
- you have suitable nozzles for direct metering of the gas into the cylinder just before ignition
-would have a controller that would control the volume based on the cylinder pressure and other engine parameters.
The efficiency of compressing and then using this energy is therefore only 30% , unless the heat lost in the expansion is recovered, which we have a lot of in the internal combustion engine, the whole process would be very energy efficient and useful in my opinion, but I cannot realise this in my home workshop. The question is, what is available to me, whether to compress gas, or to charge batteries, or to use gas directly.
Bosch: Direct injection for CNG engines - more efficiency, more driving enjoyment | Automotive World
Shranjevanje energije s stisnjenim zrakom - Wikipedija, prosta enciklopedija
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I think this should be possible. We have CNG cars, and you can refuel them in your garage. Number 1 Problem I think will be to make your woodgas very clean first, or maybe you will ruin this beautiful machine.
Search term: cng refueling
CNG United offers Fuelmaker C3 home re-fueling systems for all of your CNG fuelled vehicles. These re-fueling systems connect directly to your existing natural gas line and require a 220 volt circuit than can be installed from almost any home’s existing electrical box.
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Hello Tone. Good reads. Translated well. Try this one for comparison:
Heavy oil direct injection was modeled out and improved over decades. A liquid under thousands of PSI; multiple hundreds of Bars. Advances, Advance. Advances to now Mazda Motors latest in vehicles, SkyActive D systems.
Gasoline Direct Injects (a liquid) also has as you’ve read had many potential benefits too.
In real Life usages . . .
By real people; operating year around; it has developed very uneven experiences.
Some engines without gasoline washing of the back sides of the intake valves carboning up too badly to run. This at 20% normal engine service life’s. Services developed now to try, and particles blast clean the in-place valves, lower intake passages and combustion chambers.
Such a problem. And to optimized best RPM/load characteristics of each fuel delivery system that some engines are now using dual DGI and back too intake port injector sets. Toyota. A few others, European. Expensive.
My LPG article is 2020. Updated from 2012. Still mostly in development. Has to be reasons for this delay.
Your direct injection of CNG article is from 2015. Seven years ago. If viable that should have been in production vehicle engines for ~2 years somewhere. Europe; Asia; the Americas. Who? Where?
Direct injection of hydrogen fueled (a gas) piston engines pursued for 20+ years now. Not in production use yet.
All of these will become a futile pursuit; and unrealizable to production make for the original equipment engine manufactures.
“The Will of the People” is being bent to hate and reject all Carbon containing fuels. Reject all internal, or any combustion engines.
Pay attention to the latest Climate Accord meetings, and agreements of 2021?
Follow that down to local declarations later as in New York city now wanting no methane usage built into in any new multi-residential buildings. Electricity for all in building energies.
Yeah. And how will this new use electricity be produced?
Call me Mr Grumpy. Cake-Eaters care not the how, and the why . . . just that they always do have cake. Delivered on time. And perfect to them. With each city, county, region not wanting any new electrical power plant; or power makers any type, in their areas.
The fancy English word is disingenuous. Or as we common say: NIMBY’s!
Steve Unruh
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Mr Grumpy? No. You’ll always be Mr Smartypants to me.
I don’t have anything to contribute here except those compressors are available. My son picked one up off Craig’s list. ( that’s a buy-sell site here in the states.) It was from a local volunteer fire station. Apparently they have to replace that kind of equipment periodically. It was made to refill Scott AirPaks. Breathing air for fire fighters so probably the same equipment they use for scuba tanks. He got the compressor and some spare tanks for 450 dollars. I think that was a fluke, but some people have a knack for finding good deals. Anyway that would be a viable option for compressing gas.
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Thanks Bruce. I will look him up. 
So it seems that water gas is still thirty plus percent carbon monoxide, which leaves me wondering why the wiki article on the original process describes it as a method for creating almost pure Hydrogen from blue water gas. I’m guessing that historically this was after an added separation step? Hmm…
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Joel, l belive the water gas needs to be furter refined in order to obtain pure hydrogen. I belive CO is oxidised to CO2 wich is then scrubbed out of the gas.
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Hi Joel,
I think that this is the misconception from the OP , what makes confusing.
"CO2 and methane) compose such a large portion of the gas, while possessing such a low compressibility, "
Methane , AKA CH4 , is a potent combustion fuel for our purpose.
Co2: is kinda always present, lower % the better.
All gasses are, per definition, compressible, might be less effective, but compressible.
The only gas that is really unwanted or favorable in lowest quantity possible ( be it nearly impossible )
is Nitrogen…
This Nitrogen and Co2 are the 2 gasses that takes down the “power value” of the woodgas.
Kaboom ?
Once had that nickname, for obvious reasons, but… combustibles without oxygen are at low to no risk to explode… bear in mind however: H2O is a good supplier of both oxygen and Hydrogen…
Google -fu… i like that…
G’Fu this: Biogas = CH4/Methane… but always comes with a huge % of CO2 and H2S
CH4 is better suited for our purpose of energy generating than Hydrogen… CNG , LNG are both CH4 …
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Yeah, that Sounds right.
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Here you go JoelL.
Study a writing master:
Be sure and read his lead-in introduction.
Be sure and read his finishing afterword.
Most do not realize that RobertH. was a Naval Academy graduate Engineer and did service on big naval ships. Big ships means big power. All real Powermen know Big-Power can make for big problems. Doesn’t matter . . . steam, gas turbines, wind turbines, hydroelectric, big battery banked, petroleum refinery, natural gas.
Also, RobertH. spent his years WWII right after this story working as an Engineer in munitions research plants.
Regards
Steve Unruh
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Great story.
I was getting an adrenal rush during the read since the risks seemed so real.
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It’s an interesting question.
I think the short answer is ‘no’, there isn’t much pursuit of a medium heating value syngas in the DIY crowd. Excluding the physics issues others have pointed out, chargas is maybe 4 MJ/m3, wood gas is maybe 6 MJ/m3, definitely not worth compressing.
If you could get to 20 MJ/m3 like retort made ‘town gas’ it might be worth it for stationary systems, but probably not for vehicles.
(Natural gas is 36 MJ/m3 for reference.)
It would be possible to do steam gasification at home if you were brave/foolhardy/careful and really wanted that medium value gas.
The Wright-Malta folks built some laboratory scale systems that are well described and appropriate to home experimentation. The context was syngas to methanol but the steam gasification is well documented:
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Besides the medium value gas you end up with, the steam gasification is truly feedstock omnivorous and solves the gas cleanup.
But you need to be comfortable with 200 psi steam in a vessel and heat to 1100 deg F. Not terribly difficult in smallish batches with electric heating and insulation and some stringent safety protocol… but worth it??
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Very interesting gasification process, but obviously with the devils in the details.
First of all: alkaline catalyst. If not cheap abundant stuff like e.g. lye, the whole thing would be busted.
Second: pressure inside the vessel. Acording to paper, there was 15 pounds of wet wood with some more water (together 12 pounds) in a cylinder of around 23 gallons. Vapor pressure of that amount vastly exceed 400 psia before wood even reach the temperature of decomposition.
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I think the ‘alkaline catalyst’ is code for ‘wood ash’.
Yeah, regulation would be necessary, but you wouldn’t need a compressor.
I’m not promoting the project, mind you, just filed it away under ‘what’s possible’.
Eating anything you feed it is a nice feature, and the energy balance is attractive.
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Just read @Matt thread on gas storage and thought there was some interesting cross over between the subjects.
A home steam gasification vessel operated in batch mode, feeding a gasometer with 20MJ/m3 gas, (without a blower) is certainly an interesting way to solve the energy storage issue for reliable domestic systems without using a battery bank or long run time engine/gasifier.
Let’s see;
** You get to skip the charcoal making problems of open flames, smoke, grinding, screening and heat recovery (assuming char-gas for small engines).
** You get access to all the low value biomass otherwise unusable for gasification.
**The higher energy content gas means you get to use a smaller storage unit.
**You get built in gas cleanup
**You have a reservoir of engine grade fuel gas (super convenient)
All for the low low price of an untested pressure vessel and it’s regulation and controls:)
Yes, we just re-invented ‘town gas’, but hey…
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Yup you get it 
… …
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You got everything right except one thing this is going to use on the market already tested systems for this tank. The tank is not there to store the gas for long term storage. It will be there to act as a buffer, it will only be a pint or one liter in volume and made out of PVC using friction caps at each end. This is tried and true as this is common in HHO systems ( my self included and is what Ive used. There will be a diaphragm pump that will supply line presure, the tank is so that it can not over pressurize. Think of this pump like your fuel pump in your car. There will be presure switch and as soon as the appliance calls for gas it will open its solenoid valve dropping presure triggering the pump to turn on. If the line presure goes over 5 psi it will turn off.
The alternative is to add a return line and run the pump with a static regulator; not sure how to do that with gas yet.
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Hey ChuckW.
You said Towne gas making.
They of course primarily were concerned with the cleanliness and energy density of their for-sale fuel gas.
So back then water washing and cooling just made sense.
But every single Towne gas making site became a toxic hazardous waste dump.
I know. I once was part owner in an auto-electric business in SE Portland within sight of one of the remaining open frame floating gas storage-pressurizing structures. The crap they washed down into the Willamette River . . . 19th Century high-tech. Piped in lighting progress.
OMSI is sited there now. They know. They Know. Lower Willamette and Columbia do not stir dredge the edges!
Even as a kid growing up in the 50’s with the chore of barrel burning the household trash
nearly all of the long-term lingering nasties were concentrated solids we’d haul away to a land fill. That was far from perfect with the air stink burning. 20th Century simple tech concentrating. There was no Rural garbage services.
WE are 21st century and any water gas cleaning need to have a water treatment complexity added. Factor that in from get-go. You don’t and other will force it onto you.
S.Job’s pocket miracles since 2007 ensures e-v-e-r-o-n-e has cameras on-person now.
And the be-your-own-publisher social sites of youtube, twitter , tic-toc, and others has too many looking for their spotlight time.
Woodgasing done best practices only makes solid wastes ash, with just wee bit of heavy tars concentrates. The collected condensates are one a mild bio-degradable herbicide. The other a mild bio-degradable fertilizer.
Steve unruh
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