keep us posted / fuel on demand is much better project/Thanks matt R
1 Like
I havenāt forgot just been busy here is a poor video in the dark but a couple of minutes in it gets a little better I was thinking the dark would inhance the flame but the camera didnāt like it
1 Like
So, this is a propane burner?
1 Like
Couldnāt watch it fully here but I love the peepers in the background ā¦ Previous woody was Bruce F in Florida with son Sean ā¦ Hope I spelled it right ā¦ Mike L
1 Like
it is brian its a ready heater that sits on a 20 pound tank I had to skip the valve I didnāt want to drill the orfice out I widd make a better burner or most likely go to the grill next.
donāt worry mike you didnāt miss much half the video you cant make out but yes the wild life is coming alive may flies have started feeding im sure in your line of work you donāt need to be told.
1 Like
Paul, I enjoyed the water foul as well ā¦ Iāve been taking pictures of tree frogs when I can ā¦ Bats are rare here now ā¦ Mike ā¦ Just keep burning when you can ā¦ Mike
1 Like
Paul, I grew up on LI (South Hempstead) yes, after hemp ā¦ I was bussed to Rockville Centre and Howard Stern (Howie) was in my classes ā¦ I went to college in Farmingdale and Buffalo ā¦ I lived in Buffalo for near 8 years total ā¦ Upstate NY means nothing to me ā¦ Pepe is upstate ā¦ I think Robin is going to try to make it from Maine to Argos ā¦ Iām not sure if Rick is coming as he moved some of his stuff south from Tully ā¦ Only a few weeks ā¦ Regards, Mike LaRosa
1 Like
I would like to get together with some of the locals but its hard to find time argos would be great the 1200 miles would take a month straight to gather enough wood to even attempt im still working on making the process as efficient as I can .lots o wood .
howard stern he,s a trip I cant picture him in school
1 Like
Reason I ask is because Iāve never heard of a Ready Heater, and it just peaked my interest that propane burning appliances could be used (modified) to run on woodgas. Not necessarily from stored pressurized gas, but from a ātowngasā arrangement where the woodgas is pumped and piped into homes in a neighborhood from a common plant.
1 Like
Hey BrianW
Net search up Chinese woodgas cooking stoves. The commercial cook stove versions. JQX-10 something, something.
The most common use an AC electric blower sucking the hearth/hopper/grate assembly live; than blower pressure direct feeding a two burner stove top.
Two DOW menberd here do have these modified to be able to engine fuelgas feed.
Really fellows. Low pressure storing gasifer made fuel gas is old hat. Read Tylers 1906-7 treatise here in the DOW library āProducer Gas and Gas Producersā.
Anyone familiar with current liquified supplied propane and street ānatural gasā should appreciate that live making and using woodgas; or low pressure BULK storage bypasses the need for all of the high pressure fuels gas stored vaporizers, re-heaters and multiple pressure droppers, back flow/backfire safety valves. Just look at the street gas valving/pressure array outside any commercial building!
That alone in addition to huge energy loss in compressing, then cooling to high pressure store. And long term CO fuelgas reversion to soot and non-combustable CO2 'aught to set your direction.
Three different fellows youtube doing this NONE LONG TERM STORING, then engine proof using, proves very little to me.
Regards
Steve unruh
4 Likes
Gas storage China style!
1 Like
Interesting discussion about storing wood / producer gas.
From what I have read, on the thread there seems to be some confusion over basic properties of wood gas versus propane / methane. Propane and methane are very compressible, propane actually can be used as a better refrigerant gas than Freon, because of the low energy compression. Wood gas on the other hand resists compression all the way. In order to compress wood gas, a significant amount of energy has to be put into the process with not nearly the same benefits. Also, wood gas is less energy dense than a pure hydrocarbon gas, so energy put into compression begins to significantly cut into the overall process energy efficiency.
That said, I can imagine some scenarios where the convenience / utility might outweigh the inefficiency. If a person had a fairly large tank, like a home heating propane tank, and the compression wasnāt too high, perhaps 2 or 3 atmospheres, it might serve as a decent amount of storage for lighting or cooking, (CO alarm in the home!) or occasional running of a small generator, without having to fuss with making the gas on a regular basis. Another thing that I wonder if itās practical would be to carry enough compressed wood gas in the back of a truck to drive any useful distance. This would eliminate the weight and complexity of the gasification on demand, and might make for a simple driving arrangement for a certain distance, perhaps daily commuting.
I agree that with any storage system, an oxygen sensor is a necessity. And keeping storage vessels at a safe blast distanceā¦
The other thing that seems to be missing from the discussion is that engineers about 150 years ago already recognized and dealt with the limitations of town gas, the solutions they came up with were industry standard until being supplanted by natural gas systems.
The āgasometerā was the practical solution. The gas bag, or floating steel casing naturally pressurized the system to mains pressure, serving as a pressure regulator. The large volume storage avoided higher compression. The big issue for a home based system would be how to build a gasometer.
It occurs to me that a grain silo would do. Older ones can often be gotten for just removing them. A protective lining would have to be put in the interior, or carriage head bolts used to rebolt, leaving a large volume container complete with roof. A gas bag would fill the interior, with some sort of weighted and guided top deck. Iām not sure what would be the best material for the gas bag, it would have to be fairly flexible at low temperatures, thick and tough enough to survive some rubbing. Hydrogen is able to diffuse through many substances, but I suspect Mylar film is fairly impermeable, being used for helium balloons. Maybe a laminated polyethylene Mylar, or rubber / Mylar, there might be something commercially available.
In a rural setting the grain silo wouldnāt be out of place, and wouldnāt have to be very close to where it was being used, poly pipe could be trenched.
Thoughts and comments?
2 Likes
No interest in this subject ( right now) but I do have some knowledge of silos as I have one on my property. You are looking for a gas bag for inside the silo, I would suggest one of the round plastic cylinders that farmers are now using in place of silos. Not sure of the dimensions of the plastic bags but I think the ones I have used were 10 ft. in diameter and 75 ft long. I believe my silo which I have never used is 20ft dia and 40 ft tall. They are now using large flat plastic sheets for covering silage, that are so big the place used tires on them to hold the plastic down. TomC
The large plastic bags could be a good start. Where I am (southern Manitoba) we can get temperatures down to minus 40, centigrade, not that it makes much difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Poly would likely be a lot better through most of the US. Up here everything can get more complicated as you run up against the limits of materials, poly would be ok April to November.
I may have been using the wrong term for what we would call a grain bin up here, the first generation ones are obsolete, worth scrap price now, 15 - 20 foot diameter bins. A welded silage silo would be far better, but tough to move. If a person has one unused, it would be a real asset.
The other thing I forgot in my other post was to say that I agree that storing wood gas is potentially dangerous, and the stored gas is not very energy dense. I suspect retort gas would be a better prospect for storage, possibly with better compression characteristics because of the composition, and there is lower risk of oxygen contamination given the way itās produced. The setup would be a biochar retort system, efficiency wouldnāt be as high, but the gas would be more valuable, and biochar would result.
Good summary synopsis of the situation Sir.
I agree for home/farm lighting and cooking woodgas bag/floating BIG container stored at atmospheric or just above atmospheric would be possible.
The huge above taxi/delivery truck zeplin type gas-bags, and a SE Asian poly/mylar gas bagged whole storage building needed for just a small power generator shows that the energy density of wood gas for useable IC engine makes this very impractical for vehicles.
And as you say; since the woodgas components will not compression liquefy even vessel storage at 100 or more bars makes still for a very short range vehicle with then a near negative net energy accounting for the energies needed for compressing it.
When you see the pictured up WW II German and occupied counties cars with the multiple high pressure gas fuel tanks on top having the small distribution lines - This was acetylene used as a fuel gas. Expensive! Doctors vehicles. Desperate times.
Best regards
Steve Unruh
1 Like
I hadnāt realized they were using acetylene for vehicles in occupied Europe. They were very desperate times, hopefully we donāt end up living a similar energy crisis one day.
Iām not sure if retort gas can be ruled out the same as wood gas. From what I have read the energy density is nearly comparable to natural gas, and since much more of the gas is hydrocarbons, plus no inert gas, it may be more amenable to compression.
I believe āretort gasā is mostly water, the complex hydrocarbons most refer to as ātarsā (for good reason), and a bit of mixed acids called āwood vinegarā.
Sure, tars have a lot of energy density, but they turn to a hard/sludgey mess when cooled which will gum up engines and clog storage vessels/transportation pipes/fittings.
2 Likes
āOn the average, destructive distillation yields approximately 32ā38 percent charcoal, 45ā50 percent liquid products, and 16.5ā18 percent gaseous productsā
This article includes a table breaking down the analysis of birch vs pine distillation. 32 and 38% by weight remains as charcoal, another 28 - 22% is water vapour, 7 and 3.5% acetic acid. Approximately 83% of the wood by original weight will result in non combustible / non gaseous products. The water vapour, water soluble tar and acetic acid should be no trouble in a large low pressure storage system, as they will condense, and pool in the bottom, and not interfere in any way with the stored gas, basically the same as the condensate trap on a vehicle gasifier. The heavy tars should condense at relatively high temperatures, which should allow separation in a separate collector. The ābio oilā has roughly half the energy content of crude oil, and has value at least as wood preservative, or could be put back in the retort with another batch, I expect it will tend to crack into lighter compounds.
This Google book states that wood gas is about 46% nitrogen, and consequently has an energy content of 140 - 200 btu / cu ft, vs 360 - 420 for retort gas. I expect that part of the content they would have measured would be tars, but I am interested in the energy density, and potential compressibility of the end product gas for certain applications. The resulting gas from a retort process seems to beat a wood gas hands down from the energy standpoint. This would be especially important for use in a torch system, which was the original start of this thread, far higher temperatures could be achieved. Higher temperatures for cooking gas, probably higher horsepower for generators, etc.
To me it seems thereās enough potential to merit exploration.
Working from the table I cited above, I summed the gaseous compounds, the breakdown is fairly similar in content to woodgas, but with variations - about 2/3 CO2, instead of roughly half nitrogen, 21% CO, 3% CH4, and roughly 11% methanol, acetone and hydrogen. I think the methanol and acetone will have higher energy content than hydrogen, so it should be roughly equal to ordinary wood gas, with a different composition.
Recycling the bio oil may improve the gas content, amounting to a major energy efficiency. The equipment for a retort is much simpler and easily scaled up, and the process is very carbon negative if the charcoal isnāt burnt.
I just wanted to get the notion into the discussion, I will be tackling a system once warmer weather arrives, hopefully bring some positive reports.
If you look at the woodgas analysis Wayne did at Auburn University Library / Auburn Test | Drive On Wood! the gas was only 4.24% CO2, equivalent CO @ 22.38%, 0.06% CH4 (doesnāt sound right, Iāve heard quotes of 3-4% from others), but 22% hydrogen. I think the CO2 vs nitrogen would have some effects, but not much overall.
I think retort gas would probably be great for the first trip. I donāt think it would work well enough to try to filter/distill out the tars to avoid having it be a āone way tripā.
That āTeslonianā dude shows that one ācanā technically run an engine on what amounts to retort gas, but as most folks here will point out: Teslonian never shows how things are working the next day, a month down the road, and certainly never āhey, I just put 10,000 miles on my truck on (Retort gas) and itās still running great.ā
To summarize my point: I am not arguing the energy content of retort gas, and agree that it āprobablyā would run ok for the first trip. The questions that need asking: will it run an engine consistently? Is it likely to kill the engine?
5 Likes