Mercedes-Benz E230 vol. 2, charcoal powered

Can you give us a better address to your wife’s channel? I could not find anything on youtube. TomC

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Thierry, spot on!
In the summer l will try to run dry charcoal and inject water in the air preheater. This way l hope to boost efficiancy (water boils with exess gas energy instead of the reaction energy) and cool the outgoing gas.

Don, right. This is nearly maximum the system can handle. To tell the truth l didnt think it wuld make this much gas, its so tiny…
I wuld guess this is about the amount needed to push the car around 50mph.

Dave, yes, but it seems wet char has a drawback, it sparks like crazy. I hope l dont end up with too much dust in the system.

Bob, you culdnt see it but the gas kept burning inside the gas port thus lighting on starting the shopvac.

Tom, here you go, the videos.

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Nice Christmas flare, Kristijan!
Please keep pics and videos coming. It would be very interesting to watch this thing slide into place.
Is there room for another setteling area? Looks like it wouldn’t hurt collecting a few sparks and dust before the piping up front.
I couldn’t help noticing your shirt sleeves in the video. -17C here this morning. I’m not leaving my next to the fire armchair :smile:

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Thank you for reposting— my memory is getting bad. Yesterdays posting I had to go a long way back to find cut away pictures to understand what was going on. Now today I am just as confuse, but thank you. In going back I did come to the conclusion you are building a much modified Imbert – eliminating the pyrolisys zone and going right to the oxidation zone, I don’t know if you can say you have a reduction zone. In previous charcoal builds people have been able to eliminate gas cooling tubes by going from the bottom of the hopper to the top. ( up draft). Yours is a down draft ( Imbert minus the wood hopper ) and the gases will come out at at least 600+ degrees F. Max has recommended a minimum of cooling pipes which I believe is considerably more than “none”. I built a counter flow heat exchanger several feet long and I did conclude that after a couple of feet the exchanger did not do much. Obviously, you have decided your heat exchanger is going to cool your gas enough to maybe run through plastic pipe. I am watching close and hoping you are correct. If so maybe I could get enough cooling in my cyclone and hay filter to forget about cooling pipes. You just amaze me with you thinking and builds. TomC

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Update;



Gas pipe. Lots of bends. But it fits perfectly now and can barely be seen.even from beneeth.

The gasifier in the mufler compartment




This is how l made the auger. Not ground and finished on the pic. Its the 3rd atempt, l tryed two other ways without sucsess.

Unfortunaly it did not work. I made a cordless drill/angle grinder power train for it, it has loads of torq but as soon as l ladded 2 buckets of char in the hopper it wuld seaze. Too much friction still.

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Try winding 1/4 " rod around a pipe for an open auger.

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Thats a crying shame about the auger not working as expected as it looked a work of art , all i can remember about augers from my years in recycling plastics was that the depth/height of the flights need to be as low as to not be able to grab so much and also keep the distance between each flight a few inches apart so its a more gentle spiral . well done on your pipe work , no wonder you have not been posting here you have been far too busy doing it .

Dave

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Don, this seems to be the only way. Only problem is l dont have the rod and stores are closed for the next 3 days :cry:

Dave,

Cuting off half the wawe width occured to me, but l have a place to put this size auger (my greenhouse heater). At least l wount feel bad wasting allmost a day of work on this. I will try the “spring auger” first then modify this one if that doesent work either.

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Is it just binding? The flights might be too close together. however, that is a lot of work to cut them off the tube and try to stretch them out. I would try reducing the size of the hole that feeds the auger so it doesn’t get as much material and see if that works better.

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First of all, congratulations to having summer again. Pics look like in June. No wonder you’re able to do outside work :wink:
If you’re going for another try on an auger, I’m with the others about smaller dia and the flights further apart. Don’s idea of an open auger is worth a try too. You don’t have to wait for stores to open if you have a rebar or a similar rod.
Very nice work on the under the car pipe. How about washing out ability? How much additional cooling do you need?

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I like your dogged determination to solve the problem. We’re all rooting for you!
Pepe

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You might be able to make a spiral wood chunker out of it, which would probably make a pretty good charcoal processor as well. You feed it in at like a 45-60 degree angle to the auger. almost all of the dust seems like it would be inside the tube, and fairly easy to bag. And there is potential to actually screen out the fines first.

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This auger is much too light construction and the wrong geometry to function as a chunker.

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It is a valid point. :slight_smile:

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Ha, June pics wuld be on a hayfeald :blush: but it is true we had extraordinary warm weather. Around 0c.

Washing out. I plan to wash the cooler/pipe once a week. Althugh the gas pipe has no conectiins. Water will come in from the cooler and exit the ashdoor.
On the cooler, my guess is l need less squere inches thain with wood gasification since the gas has no moisture. On details, more tomorow.

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Help plese!

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Hi Kristijan, when you are running the auger motor the auger shaft is turning really fast in rpms. If you could change the rpm to run it slower rpm and keep the motor turning the same rpm you would have more torque. Need to change the gear ratio if you can. I like the auger design you came up with.
Bob

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What if the augers flights were a couple inches longer so they could push the char closer to the left side chute?

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I was going to mention just what Don has , is there a reason for stopping the flight as far back as you have ?
I am no expert but i have used dozens of augers and moved hundreds of thousands of tons through them over the years , on all types and sizes or plastic , the flights are designed to do certain things depending on the flight angle, depth.and speed
So before you change anything else can you try filling the hopper just about your augur with say rice or something that has a rough uniform size and with a smooth shape maybe pea nuts or anything else you can think of and watch how it moves , then if it does move everything to wards your discharge chute i would then try charcoal that is smaller in size and try again and keep going down in size like that and see if it helps to move it along , when you do manage to get it to move as intended look at the size of the charcoal that moved and if its a size you can manage then great if its too small then , you will need to increase the depth and or spacing between each flight , a auger is nothing more that a material mover and will only move what it can fit between the flights of the auger because it is not enclosed in a pipe it will allow material to bounce and ride over the top of the flights .
It is very hard to explain in text and being remote makes it even harder to explain but apart from making the flight a little longer up towards your chute i wouldn’t change anything else just yet .
And by the way your workmanship on that auger is bloody fantastic , well done .
Dave

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Bob, going any slower wuld be too slow. Keep in mind no matter the gear ratio the DC motor will always change the rpm when under load. When it starts to move char it moves about half the speed with drawing 1-2A wich is good. It even works on 6V.

Well guys l made the auger shorter becouse l had planed the paddle there. But thats not happening. It stalls the auger. Puting on a stronger drivetrain wont help anything, becouse the fact auger is stalled means there e is exess force on the auger, means charcoal will be crushed somewhere.

But now l guess l culd ectend in a bit. What do you guys think, weld in a nother section or expand this auger? The angle will change some in this case…

Dave, l tryrd with engine grade charoal. Any particular reason why you think l shuld with something else?

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