Now on five valve engines suggestions. This was not a joke.
The REAL reason almost all roads driving vehicle engine manufactures have gone four valves per cylinder is then BUILT-in with in the actual engine much better hydrocarbons reduction emission WITH better fuel use economy.
This is because the heads of the valves are the hottest area inside the combustion chamber.
You can search up on NET thermal scans proving this.
I read and studied Emissions Tech training manuals. And followed trade publications.
The other areas are cooler quench areas.
Of course with easily combusted wood and char fuel gasses we’d be after the higher flows made by multi-valves.
Hey. Once you done a few multi-valve heads jobs you just get to chanting, “It’s all just nuts and bolts.”
And you’ve been saying you like to complicate the shit out of things TomH.
Ha! Ha! Let someone else do this and then go with their flow. To your advantages.
S.U.
Now here is the woodgas engine still unexplored area.
The now been in production since ~2004 variable cams timing engines.
My recently bought 2004 Toyota Camry has the exhaust camshaft oil pressure valved through a vane phase able to shift 50 degrees.
The next Camry engine began in 2008? (the sisters 2011) can have both the exhaust and intake cams live running shifted.
This is done trough a very familiar hydraulic control spool valve. 12vdc control solenoid duty cycled. And you can direct read the cam timing in degrees via the OBDII port with a $150 scanner.
Here on the DOW many now trailer brake controller dial-in duty cycling their in-tanks EFI fuel pumps.
10 mile radius I can put hands on at least three of these Camry’s dead sitting. Be $350-400 usd each. Haul away. Motor mounts/brackets, cradle, radiator/fans, wiring harness and all. Off set with boned out parts selling. And scrap metal selling.
All aluminum engine. With cast iron bores.
Lots to be gained with cams twisting optimizing. And never have to touch pressure boosting.
Ever come a real time of need and it ain’t ggonna’ be 55-97 old push rod Chevy’s, Ford and, Dodges available.
It will be these four valve DOHC four cylinder vehicles as the go-too.
Want more cubes; more cylinders? GM’s mid-sized inline six engines. Four valve cams twisting DOHC. Those pickup’s now in wrecked, let sit, too expensive to repair cheap now too.
Learn now while this learning is easy. Or slug it out later when it is cold dark and needing.
Get your family/neighbor teenager boy or girl interested to help do the electronic hack-in. Hellava’ lot more productive for them than robot warring.
S.U.
I am the last one who want to blame you for anything, @tcholton717.
It seemed to me that you are trying to get more motor power from the same amount of fuel in your gasifier. That let me to agree with @SteveUnruh that the motor side is right side of interest, because gasification chemistry is hard to change. You can just optimize you gasifier to achieve best equilibrium it can handle and I can’t see the way how to overcome it. You can switch from air to oxygen which gives more calorific value producer gas, but it is not practical for many reasons. You may add some other fuels into air intake (gas, alcohol, oil, …), but then you do not get more power from wood, but from this fuel added.
Influenced by my job habits, I would like to ask you two questions:
WHY do you want more power from wood?
WHAT is your expected outcome?
The most important reason I see is that you can’t get superheated steam out of thin air. A lot of energy and high pressure. Very impractical for vehicle application, IMHO.
In a piston engine, the initial injection of water cools the fuel-air mixture significantly, which increases its density and hence the amount of mixture that enters the cylinder. The water (if in small liquid droplets) may absorb heat (and lower the pressure) as the charge is compressed, thus reducing compression work.[1] An additional effect comes later during combustion when the water absorbs large amounts of heat as it vaporizes, reducing peak temperature and resultant NOx formation, and reducing the amount of heat energy absorbed into the cylinder walls. This also converts part of combustion energy from the form of heat to the form of pressure. As the water droplets vaporize by absorbing heat, they turn to high pressure steam. The alcohol in the mixture burns, but is also much more resistant to detonation than gasoline. The net result is a higher octane charge that supports very high compression ratios or significant forced induction pressures before onset of detonation.
Control over the water injection is important. It must be injected only when conditions within the engine would otherwise be sufficient to cause detonation or other undesirable effects. This normally occurs when the engine is heavily loaded and running at full power, however may occur outside of these times in specialized engines or applications. Otherwise injecting water cools the combustion process unnecessarily, resulting in negative effects such as reduced efficiency or power.
Wow. Take a little nap and never catch back up. First I have to say, you guys are all smarter than me. Especially you Mr Smarty pants. Variable cam timing? Are you still speaking english? Here’s what I know. A piece of cast iron with tubes in it. A wobbly thing at the bottom pushing tube fillers up when an explosion pushes them down. a lumpy thing that makes little stemmed plates open and close. Bigger tubes means more room for the explosive stuff that gets in them from little tunnels with a mixer on top. . Less space between the tube fillers and the stemmed plates and the explosive gets squeezed. If the lumpy stick has bigger, narrower lumps then more explosive stuff can get in. The trick is that after the explosive stuff explodes you have to get it out of the tube. Another bump on the lumpy stick does the trick. You have to get at least as much out as you put in. More is better. Pretty sure I’m never going to know more about the whole deal than that.
Thank you for not blaming me for anything Kamil. I guess that means you are not one of my children. I knew that anyway. You are much better looking than any of them.
Now I’m going to have to use up a fair amount of data trying to figure out how they get that fifth valve to open. Four valves is a lot of lumps on the stick but at least they are in a line. I think I mentioned that almost all my engine experience has been on a V-8 that remained basically unchanged from 1955 until 1995?
Ha! Ha! There you go Mr. Tom.
Shaken awake. Seems my ringa-dingy memory say there’s a great AC/DC song with that in it: ThunderStruck?
Anyhow you have to admit my stuff about real in-metals things been in millions of units production for 'nigh-on 19 years now, CAN be found, and touched, and real seen, eh.
Hey, great bumpitiy-stick explanation by you . . . . aw . . . you know someone is going to quote that out.
Regards
Steve unruh
Aww . . .here my favorite version ( see . . all smartypants wear suspenders)
Mea culpa, @zardoz86. I mismatch the superhated and supercritical steam. Definitely there are many systems adding steam to the input stream of gasifier. When @r_wesseling reffered that Lowe gasification process, I was thinking about really high temperature&pressure steam.
Im out of the loop, but if you are using charcoal, you do not need to flash to steam first. If you are looking to boost H2 output; You actually do not want it to be pre flashed as it will displace the air. Instead drip into the jet and the incoming air will drag it into the gasifier. As the water gets to the end of the jet some of the water will flash to steam but some will just fly into the hot carbon. However if the water is pre flashed then it will crack more efficiently as there is already energy put into flashing it to steam.
If you are just after cooling the jet then it would be better to displace some air with steam. But just doing direct drip will also cool the oxidation process.
The water drip is doing a many things its not just one thing.
Pre steam injection is displacing intake air and then processed via carbon cracking cooling the reaction. Here you will have weaker gas, as you have lower temps to process with less oxygen and steam to be processed.
Direct water drip, is flashing to steam inside the jet absorbing heat in that process, Direct water is also blasting into the carbon cooling it and then also the resulting steam is then processed via carbon cracking.
The more I play with the water drip the more it blows me away. I think this can be done much better to a point where the water is just as much a fuel input as the charcoal. Right now the M-1 Utility gasifier I just posted on my thread, that unit is processing 2 liters an hour!! My hose and engine adaptor are bone dry no moisture at all in the gas. The generator running on this unit is just as strong as any of our raw fueled machines as well.
I see huge potential for charcoal well beyond direct raw fuels gasifier systems. I will soon be working on electronic steam injection with an oxygen concentrator to eliminate nitrogen. In this system the water will be pre flashed so I will make room for the steam by eliminating the nitrogen while maintaining penetrating velocities. This is so I can introduce more steam in process without over cooling the process and it crashing.
Ill be finally installing the little turbo on something. If that is successful that is a cheap way to boost an engine and charcoal will for sure outperform direct fuel machines. Turbos dont work with direct wood gas, the tar will destroy them.
Good info post MattR. I be digesting that one for awhile. Even doing some proofs trialing. s.u.
Now TomH down to some engine serious.
To be perfectly clear those VW/Audi five valves I saying JUST the engines boned out as woodgas power units. Their vehicles used past 100K will drive you to drinking or eating a barrel.
Five valves as you will see just have the one intake canted, with a special follower.
Ford’s “Cleveland- clicker” 351C’s. Dodges Hemi v8s.
You US, me US here the one to study and put the serious thought into:
The midsized Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon engines 2001-09.
On wood gas these would be the Dakota ass kickers. Pickup trucks ARE the best rigs to woodgas.
Sure. Sure. Some will say, “But Steve these are non-push rod engines”, “These are valve to pistons interference engines!” And plenty of Europeans have been; and are doing OHC interference engines ON WOODGAS. Back-To-The-Future’s, “Ya’ Chicken/!!?”
First stop making tars by using literal shit fuels into the gasifier. Get up; and keep up; the gasifier internal heats and temperatures. Bigger engine load them.
Second the operator on engine before starting has a responsibility to check for last use made-tars. Become that better operator.
Next. “But , Steve it has a plastic intake manifold.” Ok. . so . . make up a tube stock metal intake manifold. Ya’ squish oval the tube stock cylinder head ends. I’ve been making at times inline four cylinder intakes since 1973. VW Rabbit hotrodding. And others. Even one V-4 cross two carb.
Making up your own tube metal intake then you can pitch out the drive-by-electrical-wire throttle body. Go with a morning foot-feels, can-feel tars, throttle by cable.
Yep Yep. Pitch out the skid control and all of that other fancy stuff then; forcing the need for the DBW.
GET THE manual transmission pickup!! No more need for a PCM trans computer then either.
I did a Colorado MT 5-speed R&R at the Buick dealership. Broken mainshaft snap ring shoulder from a ham-handed previous owner. Would not stay into 5th overdrive. The MT trans only have some sensor outputs. And some: a fifth gear electrical lock out. Disable.
Where you need the hotrod aftermarket is for the ignition side of it coil-over-plug.
And that aftermarket is there.
Unlike the Dodge 4.7L SOHC V-8’s
And the inline 4.2L had 5 cylinder 3.5/3.7L. and 4 cylinder 2.8/2.9L spin off engines. ALL nearly 100% internal parts interchangeably.
A deep reach into well to plumb.
Plenty of meat in this to chew on.
All 10/1 factory cr’s.
S.U.
You are right. Plenty of meat. Also you are one of the few people I’ve come into contact with that knows they can build their own intake manifolds. If you are not some kind of engineer then a bit of trial and error for sizing length of the runners but not nuclear science. When I was young everybody was jamming bigger carbs, higher duration cams all kinds of off the shelve expensive stuff to shove more and more fuel into the cylinder and then thinking it would be fine pushing it out through a cast iron factory exhaust manifold. At that time you were pretty much confined to using exhaust headers from about 4 manufacturers. You had to make the work for your application and bigger tubes were always better even if the gas going out just layed around in them because the idea of generating a vortex to suck the gas out was almost rocket science. Now you can buy a whole big box of mandrel bent tubes and build headers and exhaust systems that can even go around steering gear and miss starter motors. It would be good to be young again.
This is part of what I was trying to get at originally Matt. I don’t know what you mean by oxygen concertrator but it seems to me that if you can feed more oxygen and eliminate the noncombustible elements without making steel melting heat that would be a good thing.
An oxygen concentrator is a medical device that I think uses a catalyst to scrub out the Nitrogen somehow. So the oxygen is more “concentrated” for you to breath in. Im sure you have seen people carry one of these things around or seen one in a hospital. I don’t need to know how it works, it just has to work. I will start the experiment just using small oxygen tank to see if it is even viable or works.
Yeah another thing, is with direct woody gasification, generally the gas is wet going into the engine. I think this is boosting the engine, producing more power. In my experience with charcoal, it is not wet at all. We may benefit by water injection or steam injection into the engine as well as the gasifier. This will also help clean the engine.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly to both of you.
Tom maybe not you, but me hand ox-acetylene 2 stoke tuner exhausts in high-school welding projects. I got a B+. Not MIG. Not TIG. Torch tip, puddle control with the add-filler stick in the other hand. Later I gat real, real good brass brazing with the same torch. Bi-cycle frames, cast iron exhausts. And yes my own cut n’ fit intakes.
MattR I think some of those concentrators work by membrane separation. Not pure oxegen. Consentrated up from 21% to ???
And water boosting work in an IC first just as it does in a charcoal bed. You have to have the excessive heat in-place to get your first steaming expansion 300/1? 7000/1? as I recall (poorly). Then of course in the gasifier char bed to super-heat; and then finally molecular reduction. Not just a heat driven reaction on the H2O. The reaction of the energize free hungry carbons oxygen stripping FROM EVERYTHING. They will strip out the O’s of the bonded chromium oxide from SS.
Can too easily have too much H2O with then quenching, temperature plunging. Wetting and washing in the IC engine.
Why if all of this was easy any old University Graduate student could do it.
Nope. Metals smiths. Black smiths. Welders. Hard operating wood stovers.
That pro basketball player able to drop shoot the ball off of a 3-5 story building into a standard sized hoop. And do this not occasionally but more often than not. Baseball bat a far above average.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours see-touch-feel practice.
Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. These and other high skills things been mechanized, production “taped” controlled; now didigtized. The whole basis of mega-factory productions.
But in 1998-99 we were hand controlling the too small of machinery to make the first runs of 300mm wafer for the Iridium Sattlelite phone projects.
Tom get a young’un family member to get interesting in doing your engine controlling hacking. Buy and supply them the engine controlling EFI hot rodder books.
THEN you are young again. Still Pushing forward.
S.U.
Don’t I wish Steve. Even when I had the building business I could not find young people that wanted to work and learn. Even something absolutely fundamental like reading a tape measure. My own children or grandchildren. Lost causes. Lost in video game worlds. It weighs on me and others that we have a life time of learning and no one to pass it on to. What a waste.
