One other thing to consider is what level your fabrication skill are at. Building a WK is a challenge. You need to be an above average welder for starters. If you have those kinds of skills then you could build a wood gasifier that is fully detailed and proven to work by many over a long period of time. Some people here run over 7 liter engines with one so it would probably produce enough gas to run your three gen sets if you were able to run from one to the other making air/fuel adjustments which can change depending on how well your feed stock is being processed and fed within the gasifier. Pretty large learning curve on any of this. The only way to learn is by doing. These guys giving you this advise didn’t learn it in all in a book or on the web. What they are revealing is hard learned lessons from many years of trial and error.
yea Sean I know all about biochar.i already use it,mainly to lower the acidity of my compost.how big of a generator can it be to run on a charcoal gasifier? And is your name really Sean O’Malley? Lol
Tom I’ve got a cheap ass harbor freight welder that I’ve used like 10 times.wouldnt be to pretty but I could get it done.i was curious if inside the hearth would melt the welds,I was gonna try and keep welds away from the combustion area.
Then you have 90% of what you need already. This is a 1991 lumina minivan, which used the GM 3.1L. I would say that could get you pretty close to what you need with a genhead on it.
Okay, lets think about this. On Wood my gasifer in the Dakota gets 1.3 pounds of wood per mile. Now charcoal looses half of its energy when all the tars are baked away in the process of making charcoal maybe more depending on what kind of wood and how it is done, this is the quality of the charcoal.
Lets just say you will need 2 pounds of charcoal to go 1 mile because you can get a little H2 back by using water vapor. Now I want to go 200 miles round trip. So that is 400 hundred pound of charcoal. But how much bulk is that to carry in the vehicle. If I now am pulling a trailer my mileage just dropped some more. May it is 3 pounds to 1 mile. And now I will be hybrid driving a lot more using Dino fuel. The plus side is this …
I do not have to worry about tars any more and I can use engines with plastic intakes, carburetor, EFI, . So the real question is this, can you haul enough charcoal to make the round trip. @KristijanL, @k_vanlooken, and others have proven it can done so have the wood gasifer people have proven it can be done, and both can walk away and do other things with automation or with out. It is how good of a gasifer builder are you and how good of a operater are you when it comes to gasification. Hack some people can’t even run a modern wood stove correctly with dry wood. Wet wood forget it but it can be done if you now how to do it correctly.
OKAY Just for Sh**s and giggles I would love to run my 1976 25 ft. Dodge Motor Home with a Onan 4.0 kw Genset and a 440 cu. In. Engine that will easily roll up to 90 mph. down the highway and climb up hills at highway speeds, ALL ON charcoal gas and hybrid driving. Why because it get 8 miles to a gallon of gas. And if I pull the boat it stills gets about 8 miles to a gallon of gas. It was built when the highway speeds were reduced in the US and in Canada. This Dodge was built in Canada. The 440 cu. in. engines are strong. And the gearing is lower.
Okay call me crazy… I will just take it has a complaint anyways. But I really would like to do this. And then use the charcoal gasifer for heating the motor home with the genset and electric heating. And also charging the batteries and cooking with charcoal gas outside on my gas stove, all at the same time. Saving monies on buying LP gas. I might build some tiki torches to burn too for lighting.
Just like they did in Seattle from 1909 to 1956, but on a much smaller scale.
Bob
Good morning Mr. Bob .
Did you mean 1.3 miles per pound of wood ?
There is the deception of charcoal. Charcoal pr lb has more BTU energy than raw wood does pr lb. Charcoal is 9600 btu per lb raw wood is 8600.
When you produce charcoal yes you lose some energy making it. You also lose energy producing chips or chunks and then also energy in drying. If say you used a gasifier to power the equipment to chip the fuel, how much are going to " burn" in your gasifier to produce those chips?" I cant speak for chunking yet but as for chipping I have a good idea and the energy involved to produce chips is about the same as producing charcoal. There is not that much loss if any.
Then going from raw fuels to charcoal. The M-1 Ute has a much smaller hopper than the old Raw Fuel M-2 / 4 Utility machines. Plus fuel does not fully consume to the depth of what those old machines did. It does not fall short by very much and its probably closer to half the capacity of the wood machines.
Oops, yes Wayne I said it backwards, I mean 1.3 miles per 1 pound of wood. Thanks for the correction. Even with old dryed out gray barn wood I can get 1 mile per pound of wood.
Bob
Here is a small woodgas generator. It is cross draft, so higher tar, but it is a no-weld design.
I was looking forward to opinion on the wood gasifier to run a gasoline engine. I have heard of running engines on just gas fumes, it does work. However, I learned in college that fuel is also a lubricant for pistons. This means to me that running on fumes or worse, wood, there would be no lubrication. This thread turned out really informative for me. Thanks, everyone.
Hello AnnieC, welcome to the DOW.
Only a few engine fuels contribute to cylinder walls lubrication. Diesel and some kerosene’s.
Most liquid fuels like gasoline and alcohols actually wash piston distributed oil off of the cylinder walls.
Dry gaseous fuels like methane, propane, woodgas have little effect on the cylinder walls.
An internal combustion engines cylinder walls are lubricated by crankcase oil splashing up directly onto the lower cylinder walls some.
But also oil splashed up (or newer engines - intentional pressure jet spray) of oil up, onto the inside of the piston.
This oil then is distributed out by the lower oil control rings. With the excess scraped off, piston going downward.
Most important to get the engine oil warmed up and then good splash/spray moving/distributing as quickly as possible for minimum internal engine wearing. Heating expanding piston in bore helps to reduce cold running wear too.
Woodgas, or charcoal gas the danger to the engine would be the fuel gasses (NOT fumes; and never smoke) carrying in mineral ash from the gasification processes.
These are supposed to be removed by cyclone centrifuging; settling chambers; and filtration systems.
These opinions are based on 55 years of in the field, repairing and rebuilding of IC piston engines.
Regards
Steve Unruh