Bruce, of course I did not refer to you as a bureaucrat.
3 Likes
This forum definitely has a “club” vibe to it. I won’t be making additional comments unless sharing material progress on the project.
3 Likes
Just for make things more clear, I wrote about radial gas turbine not a steam one. E.g. you may construct very simple external heating turboengine from spare turbocharger, pipe coil and few fittings.
5 Likes
Mark,
What do you expect? Twelve years ago you asked us to educate ourselves about your ideas and your project. You came to a group of people dedicated to making internal combustion engines run on wood, with emphasis on Driving On Wood! Do you understand the mental gymnastics it takes to justify building, implementing, maintaining a road motor gas producer, in the face of these incredibly low gasoline prices? We are crazier than the Christian snake worshipers. Don’t get bent out of shape when you run into resistance with our acceptance of your ideas.
That said, if you want help building and deploying a wood fueled Dodge Dakota pickup, this is place for you. You can ask the dumbest of questions and always receive a patient measured answer.
Your thread will be discussed, you will receive criticism, you will receive snark, and opinion. You are still welcome to be here.
You haven’t even kicked over any cans of worms yet…Just wait until the “storing wood gas” topic resurfaces again, people lose their minds.
The one place where external combustion MAY work out better than the system we use, is if you can burn fuel of inferior quality to that required for use in a gas producer. I suspect you may be up against a low adiabatic flame temperature with inferior wood. Which would mean you couldn’t achieve high enough firebox temps, to achieve the efficiency.
Perhaps look at Greg Manning’s Canadian Gasifier for a solution to allow burning inferior wood.
9 Likes
What you think is a ‘club vibe’ is simply most of us have 40 years of experience looking at alternative energy designs and a lot of them aren’t good. Yes, we are waiting to see what you came up with since you did say you had something working, pictures are good.
7 Likes
Mark, I can see that you want to make a small steam engine viable. I hope you succeed. But it’s going to be tough for you. Suction gas engines largely replaced small mobile and stationary steam systems in the last half of the nineteenth century, then electricity (lights and motors) replaced suction gas in the twentieth. So what’s next? I think the key is to somehow define the right mix of all the technologies we have available in each situation we find ourselves in. Your steam engine will definitely be part of of it if it succeeds. Hey, our ancestors learned to cook their food over an open fire and I, for one, like a steak cooked over charcoal. If it makes you feel any better I think I can make an improved a gas water heater. I hope I succeed, but I realize there may good reasons, that I may not be aware of, why this was not done a hundred years ago. LINK
God bless you,
Rindert
5 Likes
Hi MarkG.
I will add onto some of what Bruce Jackson was trying to convey.
A forum format is definatly not a club.
Now this forum was started by Chris Seanz and Wayne Keith to promote driving modern vehicles on modern roads using wood as the base fuel.
They already knew well, and were satisfied with their abilities to space and domestic water heat using bulk wood.
Me and many others; our concept was wood-for-power. Home/farm/shop shafts and electrical power.
Myself 12 years ago I thought I knew all I needed about using bulk wood for heating. I was 61 then and had a solid 37 years in many stoves and fireplaces using wood-for-heat.
What a forum can do for a fellow is teach you that you’ve a lot more to learn and experience using others experiences.
12 years ago after setting aside mini-steam for home/farm/shop electricity I got sucked into - stuck- on using large heavy stationary IC engines to woodgas for electricity.
Just had to be better, as heavy slow speed known for long life in term of 7500+ operating hours between overhaul restores.
I was sure dumb. Wayne Kieth on his US coast to coast on woodgas trip; and then 1000+ mile use any means without petroleum race from Berkley CA to Reno NV actually showed the much easier way. Cutting up roadside found brush and woods; and behind large stores and warehouse broken wooden shipping pallets with a portable electric motor table-saw. The saw supplied with AC electricity from a standard 3600 RPM portable IC engine generator. That generator fueled on his made woodgas off of his warmed up, and stabilized big pickup truck V-8 wood gasifier.
So I again wasted a number of years developing and experiencing small portable raw wood gasifiers to fuel operate 3500-5500 watt IC engine generators. It can be done. With specialized prepped hardwood fuels in small proportional chunks or specially screen coarse chipped hardwoods.
In the meantime Gary Gillmore and then others simply converted their local hardwood to wood charcoal and had minimal problems chargas fueling small and median electrical generators.
For all of the years until just the last three I had no access to hardwoods. Just confir woods. Sheee. Burns hot and sooty.
So mine and others solution proved to be, was to go engine generator 2X, 3X oversized.
Make the engine sizing and gasses fuel load demand large enough to heat load a raw woodgasifier to clean functioning.
And then the forum usage feedback was proving that going with the newer modern variable engine speed Inverter-Generators simplified the woodgas/engine control problems down to butt simple. No more need for rather difficult, and expensive, to find 3000-5000 watt DC generators. With for direct AC depending loads then needing rather expensive Inverters. And a battery bank.
And all along through these 12 years having determined the critical need for the glowing hot char-bed for good reduction gasification I began used the same developed thick hot char-beds in my glass fronted wood stoves to learn how to burn and heat with really wet woods; really rotten, lost weight and mass woods; woods growing molds and mushrooms; and down to thumb sized limbs woods. Only had just ONE winter woody debris open air burn pile. A mixed building materials tear out; and household trash pile left on the property we’d purchased.
And then Chuck Whitlock and Giorgio Pastor showed how to open air in barrels and bathtubs turn bare wood twigs into small engine fuel grade charcoal. My conifer limbs ends then become in easy steps an engine generators fuel.
My point is forum reading others achievements and successful trials will expand your world of proven useable alternative energies.
I follow the put-to-working practical guys.
Here, anywhere; not so much the hobbyists; the better idea dreamers; and especially not the armchairs guys. I only have an interest in pragmatic users of their creations.
Even if they chose a route that I would not.
So your continuing to pursue in real metals with real results personal steam power is why I gave you a hearts-like on your coming back post two days ago.
As said. Show pictures. Show results, and many will follow along.
I can now in an airtight wood stove make pretty blue flames any time I would wish. Heat energy driven by the made-in-place char bed.
I can burn old dry aged books for heating. Energy driven by a made-in-place wood char bed in the center. That center wood char bed made with rain wetted speed dried small wood splits. The fluffing expanding, flows clogging book pages sections only on the outer edges.
I can burn really, really falling apart rotten woods. Just takes 2X the wood volume as solid sound wood. And takes a strong ability to handle mold spores; and not be creeped out by some woods eating bugs.
I can cleanly burn wood shed floor accumulated scraped up debris. Again an energy driven process from the glowing burning char stack from the previous compressed double sack batch load.
And I can make direct-use, home & shop AC electric power in now proven on charcoal by others, modern Inverter-Generator units.
It was participating in the forum that has prodded, pushed and pulled me to expand myself to be able to grow now do all of these things.
Regards
Steve Unruh
13 Likes
Hey Mark,
I don’t think you are necessarily wrong about small scale steam. I think it probably can be done as you describe.
You are obviously aware of the issues involved, so perhaps you are well equipped to succeed. A steam plant with multiple stages, reheat, significant superheat, regeneration, high cutoff expanders, etc, can achieve reasonable efficiency numbers (but oh my, the complexity and cost).
Your use case is spot on I think. If you have a significant number of biomass heating days where solar isn’t viable, a micro steam cogen plant could work. In that context, efficiency is never going to be the primary objective.
I like your philosophy about the steam/boiler danger issue. Monotube ‘steam generators’ don’t deserve irrational fear.
It’s a bit of a hazard to compare it to other options like gasification. Too many variables, all with personal and circumstantial weightings that will never translate to anyone else.
I think if I ever went back to steam it would be because I wanted to, no justification necessary or attempted:)
Like others around here, I pursued micro steam for quite a while. I’d surely love to see you succeed (by your own definition).
Here is a video of a ‘piston operated valve’ expander I built. I gave up on multistaging and reheat and figured very high superheat and cutoff was much easier. My monotube control system grew up and moved away:)
7 Likes
I still dream of micro steam for stationary biomass cogen.
It will never compare to gasification holistically, but there is a tiny little sliver where it might belong if it were integrated with your biomass furnace when you are burning wood seven or more months of the year.
I envision:
**8 hour stoker furnace (forget it if you can’t walk away for long periods of time)
**single pass monotube steam generator with Doble control (de-superheat injection)
**slow speed uni-flow piston expander with POV (think Corliss engine with simpler valve gear)
**regulated by running against a battery bank (with fail safe of some kind)
You could probably achieve an electrical efficiency into your battery bank of about 4%, with all the hot water and space heat you need (round trip is much worse). Rough numbers; 300w electrical at 4% would require about 26k btu/hr… which is the size of a smallish wood stove.
Just think of it as part of your furnace and design for rugged simplicity over efficiency.
I can dream, right:)
Every time I fill the stove I think, "what if this were keeping the lights on and the fridge running?
11 Likes
4% good enough? Maybe my dream of making a Newcomen, condensing engine for micro cogen wasn’t so off the wall. I’m going to look into this again. Thanks for the video Chuck.
Rindert
1 Like
Since this whole forum is about making personal use powers with wood as the fuel source . . .
Then the only efficiency that truly matters is how with your own and family wood sweating labor can you make a moderate reasonable needed amount of power for yourself and your family.
And daily-use and heavy seasonal needs for heats certainly counts for overall labors-to useable-wood-forms, efficiency.
Waste the wood and then you will be wood sweating annually a lot more.
All else is head games masterbations in my opinion.
An all EV vehicle that must use a significant portion of its stored power to defrost; de-mist and cabins heat aint at all that overall efficient imho. Sorry. It is not.
Put a small IC engine in the power mix to make as needed those heats, and on-the-go batteries recharging like the wife’s Toyota hybrid is much more useful, and practical.
So PV solar and micro-steam in northern climates needing a full half of year heats may be the useful hybrid system.
Sorry for saying this again MarkG. but half of this type idealize hybrid is now off-of-the shelf. The PV solar.
So for me and others it does come down to having to one-at-a-time individually develop and build up the other half. Which way is possible? Which way is best? Wood to charcoal; wood into engine grade fuels gasses; or a full steam power system.
Under 100 hours to do an IC engine fueled charcoal system. And you will get useable heats.
200-500 hours to do an IC engine woodgassed fueled power system with again; useable heats.
Micro-steam how long to develop build and set up? How many years? How many steps dependencies?
Source the need de-minerlized one gallon an hour of water needed for a small home system?? Where? How? At what additional costs and efforts?
Put a bunch more efforts and systems costs for a full recapture and re-use condenser system?
Steve Unruh
5 Likes
Hey Rindert,
My fantasy system revolved around 750F/750psi steam, uniflow, with short cutoff… a condensing/atmospheric engine would be much, much less efficient as it violates pretty much all of the thermodynamic rules. Tacking it onto the high temp system makes sense but then our fantasy system gets really complicated.
4 Likes
I wrote a long reply about the challenges of steam and deleted it. If a person wants to play around with steam engines… have at it. I expect you’ll have tons of fun building the engine and supporting systems. If you are very skilled and persistent… you might end up with a working engine. I would expect that engine would create a lot of heat and a little motive power but don’t let that stop you.
Steam is only efficiency at high temps and pressures… that’s just physics. High temperature and pressure steam is dangerous. Be safe.
4 Likes
750F/750psi sounds like murder machinery to me. 140F/60psi is more my speed. I get the Carnot number is going to be in the bilges, and I’ll be extremely lucky if I even get a quarter of that. But so what? The waste heat will heat the house. I can also make a Stirling engine out of old soup cans. So stiff competition between Newcomen, Stirling and thermal electric generator (TEG) is the way I see it.
Rindert
4 Likes
I hope MarkG does report back on his progress.
It isn’t useful to say micro steam is a waste of time and money for the individual interested in it,
but it is true to say that micro steam is inherently less efficient and a MUCH more complicated and expensive path to using biomass than gasification. I think we are all clear on that.
Here is the main problem with micro steam as I see it;
The lure of simplicity inherent in the Rankine cycle is almost never realized.
What could be more simple than boiling water over a fire, right? Lol!
By the time you have a working system it is twice as complicated as an Otto cycle gasifier setup, and you had to build everything yourself:)
But I still couldn’t say, ‘Don’t Bother’. By all means, go for it. Just make sure you understand what you are in for… which I’d guess MarkG does.
6 Likes
I went a different direction than MarkG, but here are a few thoughts from my experience with micro steam:
**Carnot and Rankine:
Everyone should inform themselves about Carnot and the inherent limitations of the Rankine cycle. Start here.
**Danger:
High pressure and temperature steam can be dangerous, but with a minimum of precautions it is as safe as anything else worth doing. Use monotube construction and add sheet metal cowling… done, perfectly safe. It can’t explode and ruptures are non-events. The safety valve popping off can be pretty loud though. Don’t lick it…
**Boilers:
Monotube is the only way to go. Simple, cheap, safe, easy to make. Use a steam cleaner. Buy an off the shelf ‘generator’. Wind your own. Buy this coil off Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Gepphill-Stainless-Immerson-Chiller-Projects/dp/B0D6ZPTZXM/ref=asc_df_B0D6ZPTZXM?mcid=4628c27d97753d3ab54a65fb165462f8&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=695174507258&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=16177760450254779964&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032869&hvtargid=pla-2400747084197&psc=1
I’d guess you could get about 1.5 shaft hp out of that Amazon coil.
**Expander:
Uniflow, piston, POV (piston operated valve, aka ‘bash valve’) poppet valve.
Convert an air compressor. Use a Detroit diesel two stroke cylinder and piston set. Use a two stroke engine in a pinch. I used a valve out of a high pressure piston water pump for the POV.
I converted a Honda clone, which was more work than it was worth (but it worked well).
Here is a video of a converted V-twin air compressor I made. It was easy to get it to the ‘running’ stage, but it was far from done. Notice the oil/water problem (solved with cross head construction usually).
**Burner:
A wood stove won’t work. You need to leave all the energy in the smoke. Maybe a gasifier design or some other stoker or chip burner. Leave lots of room in your design budget for this element.
I built a smaller version of the old Greenwood furnace.
Eight hours of clean combustion per load, don’t have to split the wood.
**Water pump:
use a belt driven high pressure piston water pump with electric clutch. Simple on/off control.
**Regulation:
How do you control the thing? Throttle the steam with a governor? Let it work as hard as it can against a large load?
There is a lot of room for clever engineering in micro steam and if you can make it work, more power to you:) (ha ha)
You will probably have to make:
The boiler, the expander and valve gear, the burner, the safety valve, the boiler control system, the governor system, the water supply system, the exhaust heat exchanger, the lubrication system, etc.
5 Likes
https://permies.com/forums/jforum
Other people exploring steam. Pretty much the same as when us Mother Earther’s were looking for Alt energy in the late 60’s early 70’s. Never found a way for it to provide efficient motive power for homesteading. A few years back there was a website promoting little steam engines powering low rpm-high output alternators that I was interested in until people who tried building them couldn’t get the claimed results. I can’t find the site now. Seems like it was Blue Steam power or something similar but searching that comes up with with steam cleaning sites.
8 Likes
Have you looked into rocket stoves? I’ve built a few test models. They actually produce very little smoke. My favorite is the batch box rocket stove that Peter van den Berg has come up with. LINK
Rindert
4 Likes
The fire box / heat source for a steam boiler is a critical area for efficiency. As Chuck says, you can’t let all the smoke and heat out of the chimney and hope for a fuel-efficient process. The hot exhaust gases should preheat the intake air to keep more of that heat inside the system, like a condensing home heater/furnace. I’ve seen an advanced Stirling engine with that kind of combustion heater used to good effect. Related… don’t get me started on the Stirling engine rabbit-hole.
But please don’t take that comment/suggestion as encouragement. I’m solidly in Tom’s camp above on steam - have fun but don’t expect much!
Chuck… you have taken steam engines impressively far, still… I think lawn mower engine + gasifier is a much better starting place for off-grid motive power.
4 Likes
Hey Rindert,
Yeah ‘rocket stove’ combustors are a great way to meter the fuel and ensure complete combustion in that riser tube. I’ve built quite a few including an outdoor cook top for canning. My first steam boiler had one.
Aprovecho did a good job popularizing the low smoke cooker for the third world and the principles of efficient combustion necessary for biomass burners.
I like your build! Is it a horizontal feeder? I’ve seen people use various ways to make the horizontal feeders automatic.
Anthony, no doubt about it, steam is the hard way.
Nothing original in my experiments… it all came from the Steam Automobile folks. They collected the ‘doer’s’ in steam for awhile and still have some of the best ‘modern’ steam information.
http://www.kimmelsteam.com/
Tom Kimmel bought up all the old guys projects over time and has a bit of a steam museum that is worth perusing for anyone interested in ‘modern’ steam.
Some philosophizing:
Everyone has to follow their own path, but just like gasification, we tend to re-invent the wheel. Rediscovering what was already done so long ago is a great (though expensive) education, but I think a lot of us would like to see enduring value in these things.
The premise is simple; take ubiquitous biomass and effectively use it to fuel a modern lifestyle.
Most of this forum knows how to use sticks to make an engine go (steam or woodgas).
But the value is something far more elusive and complicated… the things SteveU talks about.
The end to end system that includes labor and cost and convenience and how dirty it is and whether the wife can make it go and how long it will last and how dangerous it is perceived to be.
How difficult is it to make it part of your everyday life?
These questions, in the end, seem to be more important than what technology is actually involved.
If someone offered a micro steam system that could run unattended for eight hours on firewood, generated 200-300 watts electrical, heated my house and hot water, and had a reasonable service interval… for less than $10k, I’d buy it.
I wouldn’t care if it was gasification or steam…
6 Likes