When pressing the charchoal pieces into pucks all the voids in the charcoal itself are gone except mico voids. How can they help in the gasification in a gasifier? We now have much larger pieces the pucks then is recommended for the engine grade charcoal gasifier. We still need to hold everything up into the firetube as the pucks burn and come apart into very small pieces of charcoal. With very small charcoal maybe a solid bottom grate with a side screen would be better. Like what Tone has been building and also preheating the incoming air.
As long as the charbed has big enough pieces of charcoal everything is fine to produce good qualities of gases. Keeping it loose enough with the vaccum from the engine is the key.
Making these pucks is very slow. I think keep it in the K.I.S.S. mode.
I am just going to use engine grade size charcoal.
Bob
what about retro fitting a pellet grill hopper and auger system?
I dont know what holds the charco power in pucks, ? what kind of psi, or is there a binder glue.THANKS.
I really do not know much about this puck making, not sure if it would even be posible to work in a gasifier for a car or truck. Simpler to just make charcoal and use it as engine grade.
Bob
I’m interested in using the charcoal dust without any additional processing.
Pucks or pellets would both require a binder and machinery, possibly ovens. I could probably live with extruders and pug mills, but I don’t want to deal with sourcing a binder and whatever new gasification variables it would introduce.
Densification by turning it into pellets would be awesome, but kind of a different subject.
Dust would likely just require grinding, a one step process that you have to do some form of anyway. And the grinding process would likely be more simple than grinding AND screening/sorting we have to do now.
If the 3X more dense fuel could be successfully gasified, you would have much longer refueling intervals and storage would be much simpler.
That’s the logic anyway…
You could probbly use charco dust, like in a drizeler set up, spray the right emount in as you use up the dust. That seems like it might work if one could design a feed system for charco dust, hate too waiste all the charco dust, sizing charco.not very dence that way though, Could maybe auger it out of 55 gallon barrels on demand, Could allways use the left over chardust for home cooking or heating. I NEVER TRYED RUNNING MOTOR WITH CHARCO YET THOUGH. A WOOD gasifier seems less fouling around, other than a lot of welding fab, and some properly dryed wood, I still got too get a better wood drying set up for damp cool weather. And i need too build a tar gutter on my hopper, That has too be one of the most importance,for a wood gasifier, Though chunked wood dries much faster, easyer than regular fire wood stacked up for heating wood.I looking at my heating the house wood burner, and the tar is running out around the door seal as the smoke steam is cooling, thats why them cooling finns on the WK gutter cooling tubes are used, too draw more tar out as it cools the smoke and turns it too exiting tar. WOOD gasifier is definetly a TAR battle toio follow good retrictor sizing and tar gutters, insulation ware posible, nice dry wood around 15 too 20 % moisture MAX ideal. dryness.
Even if you could get a charge of wood bone dry, it has chemically bound water that is released during pyrolysis (gasifier style partial burn). And that water absorbs a lot of heat.
If you look at the chemical formula for wood it has many components but a lot of them look like multiples of a C+H20, IE carbon and water. Cellulose is the main component of wood and its formula is (C6H10O5)n; that is repeating chains of six carbon and five units of H20 all bound together. If cellulose gets heated enough the chains break up and you are left with carbon and water, now freed from their structure. The problem is that five units of water per six units of carbon is way too much water. Only carbon is adding heat to the gasifier while water absorbs heat. Six units of heat production to five units absorbing it is not an easy ratio for keeping gasifiers hot and tar free.
Anyhow, that is why this forum generally prefers charcoal fuel. If charcoal gasifier is running hot enough that it could handle some wood fuel, well that is excess heat we can harvest with a water drip. The water drip sort of adds back the bound water you would have had in wood fuel, minus all the tar risks that come with wood.
The added water combines with the charcoal (almost pure carbon) to make CO and H2 - both gas fuels for engines. Yes, a charcoal gasifier can convert water into fuel. Cool stuff!
Hello Anthony, you are thinking well, indeed wood is a compound of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which we can interpret as a compound of water and carbon, but if that were true, only water vapor would come out when the wood is heated and dried, and the rest would be only charcoal. Because we all know that this is not true, as high-calorie pyrolysis gas is produced when wood is heated. This is how I interpret it: firstly, water is really released from the wood in the form of steam, and then the bonds of hydrogen and oxygen begin to break, which are released separately, and if the temperature is high enough, combustion occurs and water vapor is produced, this combustion releases a lot of more energy than was previously used to loosen the bonds. This high temperature also causes the release of carbon atoms, which bind with oxygen to form CO and with hydrogen to form tar gas.
Anthony, l share your opinion.
Just a minor correction, when bonedry wood starts to pyrolise, the reaction is actualy slightly exothermic. You only realy see this when making charcoal on a large scale, after all the moisture is drawn out and pyrolisis starts, no aditional heat is needed and the charge will cook on its own for hours, even days.
WOOD gasifier do have its tar too get rid of, But it Seems too work fine,many years, millions if vehicles, just operator, knowing, when wood is dry ENOUGH , water drain tanks emptied, no bridging wood and other operator task, At leiste you can burn wood along the roads, without a charco retort. Still good learning building charco gasifier powered vehicle, definatly no tar factor worries with charco gasifiers.
You can use corn starch (or any other starch) as a binder. lignin is used a lot but that forms more tars. Starch is quite as bad, but it doesn’t hold together quite as well as lignin (especially plus clay like briquettes) This is something you can do in your shop fairly easily and corn starch is pretty cheap and easily obtainable at the grocery store. It would require drying.
if you want to look at the research on various binders:
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2020.112777
The other method is a fluidized bed reactor. Where you heat the media (typically sand) and it transfers the heat to the particles and they instantaneously turn to gas. It is only supposedly effective on a large scale because you need to heat the mass of media up to temperature first and of course larger masses retain heat better because of surface area ratio. It is what industrial scale coal plants use, but it might be worth examining it, and it might give you a new idea.