not all reactors make the same color flame and judging your gas quality buy it is a BAD practice you should learn how YOUR reactor runs and different woods make different color flames and… imbert reactors make a different flame from a FEMA or a WK ore even a FLASHIFIER they are all unique and make a different color flame and i have never seen a WWII wood gas car put out a blue flame its all ways red or orange and some done even have stained flairs and the motor runs fine and has no tar so you cant compare a WK gasifier flair to a FLASHIFYER or to an IMBERT thay are all different and i want to make this clear i am not saying one is better than the other they are all just different and have different qualitys =)
If someone can look it up, or maybe @k_vanlooken can post it himseld, Koen put up a very good article years ago showing how flame colour isn’t a reliable reference to gas quality. I will respect Kristijan’s judgement though, as he is referring to signs of steam and tar.
You are right Xioe, every gasifier is a different animal, and results are what counts. You also described too damp of wood blocks at start up, and all the descriptions I see is it takes a while for a char bed to consolidate and get best results.
Here is something that I sure it has been discussed, I just can remember if it was on this forum or not.
What a tree grows in for soil content and the type of minerals that the tree absorbs might have a factor here.
You can buy color fire pine cones to place in or out door fire. When burning the these little cones they give off yellow, blue, green, red, and a mixer of other colors. This is according to what they were soaked in and then dried.
I’m no chemist or botanist but I would think that different species types of trees could absorb different minerals that would cause the flame to put off different colors. Even the same species of trees planted in different soil types.
Bob
i took it the sys open earlyer today to check things out and no tar but a ton of water in everything =( …but it was this things first time out in 3 years i aggree with you it take a little bit to get the char coan and layers to get settled in i bet if i went out right now it would run better b/c the core had time to cook after shut down and probably made some coal in the bottom =) it was too windy and cold for me to fire it up i woosed out and stayed inside lol =)
Bob, you are wery right about eaven trace amounts of minerals on changeing flame colour dramaticly. Some more thain others. Such a example is sodium.
We had a flame spectrometer at school, basicly it injects a liquid sample in a propane flame and reads out the colour change and enables you to determin its composition and concentration. Once someone spilled some sodium containing solution on the machine and it never worked right again. Trace amounts of sodium stayed on the burner. Same can be seen if you spill soup on a propane stove burner. Intense yelow orange flame indicates sodium.
This sayd, tar can be a sneaky thing too. Sometimes trace amounts can be seen in the flame, sometimes it all burns blue while glueing the pipes such was the case with me the other day. I took apart some pipes from my Mercedes gas suply (after the sack filter) and every seam was glued with droplets of solidified tar. Those pipes never eaven had woodgas in, just chargas! It is possible a couple of brands sneaked in the fuel. This is why l decided to go downdraft now.
i cant tell you how many reactors i made that had the “pefict wood gas flair” but like you said tared up the sys so bad i could never use some of the pipes again =( this is when i realized the perfict flame for my enviroment isnt blue its red to orage and the cammera i was using made the flame like yellow and this gasifier has no tar and like you said the ones i made with a suposed good flame tared up BAD!! lol =) BTW “its toataly awsome orage” spray cleaner cleans up tar better than any thing i have ever tried i got it and the 99 cent store =)
Good point Xioe about video and pictures. Some times my video looks different in color than in real-life, it all in the lighting and just because you have it on auto mode operation for your camera or cell phone doesn’t mean it will be the same on a different brand of camera or cell phone. They all have there own patented idea of digital colors. My older Canon cam recorder and VCR recorder is prove of this. Just saying, what our eyes see in real life might not be what we see after it has been recorded and digitally prossesed and then viewed by others
Bob