Marcus, I always read your posts with interest, which realistically show the state of the system. Thank you very much! Well, when I look at the content of coal and coal dust, which of course is not waste material, but you will probably return it to the process, I think about the construction of a unit that would retain and gasify this coal, if I also think about the water from the cooling pipes, I could say, that there is an ideal atmosphere under the grate for this implementation, you only need to add a little oxygen to the center of the action and the process would flow.
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Good video - again, Marcus!
You mentioned the crossover temp spiking in a resent video. Made me think of air leaks. It seems you found them.
As you may remember I use 3" rubber caps for my cleanout ports. At one point I had some debrie make one of them leak and my best guesstimation is the rail temp climbed from 250C to 300C for the same load. Later on I found a handfull of white ash inside.
My point is, it doesnāt take a lot of oxygen to make the temps climb.
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And I did find a little white ash thats what made me start scrutinizing a little closer and found the goopy silicone that looked suspect and a little spot where the paint was chalky looking
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Marcus, after you use the silcone and let it dry, what I have done is put aluminum tape over it.
On my upper part of hopper tubes where they developed holes I did this. Hum lets see about three years ago or so. Still holding up. Yup paint it black or not, easier to find that way.
Yes on your hatch cover I biilt a termial block with welding blanket and some ceramic wool, glued it together with high temp red RTV sealant.
Bob
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This video was supposed to be out yesterday morning, but I kinda got in a fight with the memory card in the go pro, what use is a 4k camera that only uploads in 1080p? Beyond me why it did that but oh well, I didnāt want to toss the footage since it was my first failure on the truck. She can get pretty hot
Iām not really sure if it was because i was running out of wood that the funcos melted, or maybe the minor air leak I discovered ignited the gas and caused the melt down. also i have nothing to base the cross over temp on, I donāt know what it should be. it seems it wants to be around 600-800f, but periodically it will start climbing into 900+, and i seem to start losing power at about 1100f in the the cross over. once it gets over 1000f, it really does not want to cool down for nothing. I may be over pulling the gasifier I really donāt know. below 45 mph the temps will not climb that high, but 50-55mph sometimes it will start climbing temp and not want to come back down. Really donāt know what it is doing. This morning it was getting hot and I opened up the air valve and left the fuel pump on and let it hybrid drive at 50mph for a while and temps still will not come down. I switched back to wood and it eventually creeped back down to 700-800f when I got into town and traffic slowed me down to 35mph. I donāt want to deduce that the restriction needs to be opened up, but it would makes sense to open it up would drop the temps some, but Iām not convinced the heat exchanger body is sealing up completely and a potential air leak of minor proportions is causing the intermittent high temperatures
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Marcus couple this with the relatively extreme amount of char dust and particle you cleaned out.
When a drill bit get dull and you force it; it gets really, really hot. It is no longer working to shear lift off metal. The energy you power apply in is being converted to heat.
When a 65CC plus sized chainsaw has the chain wear dull and you force that 5+ horsepower to keep dumping in energy it then converts to making heat. Burning the bar. Becuase it was no longer able to work by removing wood.
A wood gasifier that has stopped heat absorbing converting to energy storing fuel gases of CO, H2 and CH4 then is no longer useful working either.
Your problem IMHO is you are losing too much of your charbed. Not enough charbed the normal made mid-hearth heat enrgy is just passing through unconverted. It has stopped being able to conversion be āworkedā stored.
S.U.
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Interesting, since I did a little larger holes in the grate and raised the grate up with only a 1" gap to the firetube. I am definitely harvesting much smaller pieces of char in the dodge then in the toyota. So is this the engine is pulling the char off the grate, or was it simply to much char clogging gas flow and heat soaking the char to activation point? Yesterday after the clean out it ran normal temps 6-800Ā°f all the way home then this morning temps started rising again
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You said you could not get it to cool down even reducing the engine draw. Once it is into internal runaway it takes very little draw to maintain the overheating pass through. Not heat energy Reducing. It is called reduction by simplifying the molecules. Absorbing, locking up āreducingā the heat energy.
Then you said it took switching back to wood that eventually did reduce the overheating. Done at a lower speed demanded draw. You were evolving a new char bed.
All in m.h.o.
S.U.
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Marcus, I would really like to help you, but I donāt know if my opinion will help you. The basic factor for high temperature is enough oxygen and combustible material in the part where the temperatures are high. Do I understand correctly that the upper part was damaged? If so, after too much air enters this part, there may be some leakage at the exhibition joint with the object. Another theory is that the very hot radiation from the fire hose dries and heats a large amount of wood above, the moisture is carried away and condenses on the cooling pipes when driving in cold weather and is lacking in the reduction zone, where the charcoal glows wildly and radiates even more into the wood. pieces, but not only pyrolysis and the release of hydrogen and oxygen atoms occur here, but also the joining of only these or burning (remember how it catches fire when you open the lid, if you look closely, the air inside is NOT absorbed from the top, but there is already oxygen) inside, only the temperature from the hot cone rises and causes ignition and boom). The theory that wood burns without the addition of oxygen is true, it only needs to be heated to a sufficiently high temperature.
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So how can I avoid thisā¦ is it the to small of restriction concentrating the heat through and past the grate? Or is it the grate getting vacuumed off by the pull of the engine and not replenishing the char quick enough, which I donāt THINK it is, I would think if that were the case the reaction would cool and tar would be a result? It really seems like a over pull situation, but much slower and controlled then when it happened in the Toyota where it was almost a instant loss of power and spiked temps. The dodge is more āeh everythingās ok, its a little warm in hereā¦ ok its pretty warm I donāt want to run this fastā¦ ok its getting hot this kinda hurts a littleā¦ALRIGHT Thats ENOUGH IM GETTING HOTā¦ā and then power starts to slip away slowly, throttle response slows down and temps stay high. A few miles of hybrid drive still hot, switch back to wood and slowly temps start to fall " Iām ok, Iām ok I just needed a rest for a few minutes" and everything back to normal. And it doesnāt seem to be predictable its not oh you know every time Iām cruising in 5th and 55 it does it, or Iām pulling a big nasty hill and it does it no. Its just kinda starts climbing and if I donāt back off right away it will continue to creep up. It seems if I go over 850-900f it will continue to climb I cant stop it no matter how I drive. But interestingly my gut says its not over pulling, Iām not seeing any white ash or even gray that would indicate anything out of the ordinary. Iām probably being over worried about it, I only have about 400 miles on the truck now and it took me way longer to learn how the Toyota operated. Its a different beast and I just need to be easy on it till I find out what it wants. Maybe its a bit of a high expectation to fire up on Saturday and start commuting 100+ miles a day right off the hop
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Is your grate as wide as the air jacket, or as big as a burn tube?
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no damage was done, just the rubber connectors which are rated at 200f and they got hot enough to sag down and start separating, introducing a large air leak right at the center post on 5 out of 6 rails. That was the easy fix, what I donāt understand is this seemingly not predictable high cross over temperature. But I have nothing to base my temperature off of, the Toyota only has a gauge in the center post where gas has cooled down a lot already. Hey @Wayne what temps do the crossover in your v10 run at? And have you ever had this occur in your truck or the Wilbur smith build? How about you @JocundJake you have the same style cross over as i built, what do your temps run at normally?
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burn tube is 12" id, Grate is a full 15" diameter
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Hello Marcus .
I have the alarms set at 1000 F on both my trucks . On the dakota I have never had the temps up that high .
On the ram when temps get up near 1000 I will back off a little or go into the hybrid mode for a while until the temp drop to about 900 .
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1000f is the threshold I had in my mind that is into the danger zone, just based on the other folks with a thermo couple right on the grate that see 1000-1500f. My thought was if i hit those temps in the cross over Iām pulling way to much heat away from the reaction and need to back down. As of right now Iām trying to keep it below 900f at all times
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The design of the WK hot zone and heat exchanger is a great thing to concentrate the temperature and achieve the high values āāthat are desired for operation, but on the other hand, this needs to be balanced with the amount of water vapor that cools the process and is converted into hydrogen, CO and methane. thus, it would be necessary to reduce the condensation of the upper part under heavy load, the humidity of the atmosphere would rise and cool the process, and a large amount of strong gas would be produced.
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Iām late to the partyā¦and feel free to ignoreā¦but if it was me and couldnāt find an obvious hot leak, I would focus on the charbed. You didnāt mention vacuum ratios, but spruce/fir is known to produce low quality char. I would try to get my hands on some hardwood and see if that makes a difference. Make the fuel as small as the vacuum ratio will allow. Add cleanout char to the fuel if necessary.
I recognize the heat-behaviour youāre talking about from longer trips. A gasifier kind of have a duty cycle, within which you can expect a little more. Fully warmed up you have to be a bit more careful. I remember Wayne mentioned, during our trip to Argos in 2019, longer trips are totally different from short commute in terms of the gasifierās behaviour. And heās right (of course 
).
However different setups define long trips differently. My Mazda truck considers anything over 10 miles a long trip but the Volvo temps donāt level off until 20-25 miles into a trip.
You put me in a rambling state You probably already thought about all the above. Iām convinced you will be DOWing steadily with the V10 in no time.
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Im very interested in your and Robs research/into the timeing tables and what your able to accomplish with the tunners. Very exciting for future builds.
So this might be a dumb question. Or one i should know the answer tooā¦ do i understand right that your v10 is obd2, does not have a distributor and all timing is done by the computer.?.?
My build truck is a 97 dakota, obd2 and still has a distributorā¦ so because it has a distributor will i still be able to advance the timing manually but the computer will also control timing to a certain extent?
After all i have read on DOW that is my understanding.
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Im not nearly as exsperienced as you Jan but I thought of a few of those things. Hardwood on the way in this morning made no difference (nice dry maple) I did add back char last night a gallon or so in the hopper hmmmm have to try that again tonight I think, see if results are repeatable?
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Marcus, I hope you wonāt mind that Iām trashing your beautiful topic a little more. In fact , I check the temperature of the gasifier several times while driving my tractor , I do it just by hand , the top of the codensing zone is usually about 50 - 80 *C , the lower part , where the gases rise , is a little higher temperature 90-100 *C . I empty the water content of the collection tank and the catch chute after the run , so there is always some water in the chute during operation to prevent overheating, because if the gases start to heat up, this water would re-boil and raise the steam concentration between the pyrolysis gases, and this effectively maintains the temperature and equilibrium of the process,. what I would try in your place is to cover the cooling pipes with a flame retardant mat or aluminium foil and run this beast into the load. ā¦ iāll buy you a case of beer if it doesnāt get better 
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