Note that when you post a link, you have to highlight the text and a pop up will appear, click the chain link in the menu and then re paste the text in the window and click ok. Yeah I know this forum platform is all Wix has to offer :(
I'm going to have to think about this a while. I'm not seeing how in the intense heat of the reaction the bond between the oxygen atoms is re-established. It has to be that the outside of the reaction core is cool enough to allow it to reform.
Your sort of getting it. However the water cracking in any gasifier is not just splitting it to H2 and oxygen. This is a reaction process where the Oxygen is ripped out of the molecule and combined with the carbon. So in either case raw wood or charcoal gasification the oxygen from the water does not have a chance to oxidize any fuel in the combustion process. However the CO created can and does get oxidized from the intake air feed. converts to C02 and then re converts back to CO. In a charcoal gasifier reaction the intake air is converted to C02 and the then converted to CO and most if not all of it is converted to CO.
Ok then, back to amending the charcoal. In the WK analysis just about half of the combustible gas comes from CO and H2. Since this is a wood gasifier used in this test and since there is no mention of added water I'm guessing the H2 is gained from the moisture in the raw wood. Understand that I'm just trying to muddle my way through getting a handle on this. With charcoal the addition of water provides a supplemental source of oxygen. Oxygen increases the heat of the reaction but is used up in the process which is why there is less than one per cent free oxygen in the analyzed sample. The higher the heat in the reaction the more the water can be split into just hydrogen and oxygen. Somehow some of the oxygen binds to the carbon and becomes the primary fuel. I'm guessing the hydrogen Is somehow not consumed in the reaction and also passes through as a fuel source. Is that right? If not there is no point to this post because I'm trying to work around to amendments that provide more available hydrogen and oxygen than just water provides.
I guess I'm missing something. On your system, I think the blower is built into the gasifier itself and is run for pre-engine start-up. It it were left running after the engine was drawing gas through the system wouldn't that be the same as pressurizing the intake? I guess the boost blower is there because it's running on AC from the generator. Excuse my density. I'm trying to understand wood gas from the perspective of someone who spent a lot of time milking extra HP from more conventional fuels. There may not be a lot of cross-correlation.
No Im not using the start up blower for this. This is separate blower placed inline of the gas hose. This is experimental and not in public domain yet.
So the blower is feeding into your air intake for the gasifier?
I thought about something in that vein with my Charcoal Gasifier. Did you see that on DOW. The tall red thing with the hearth that was adapted from the Don Mannes unit in his Tracker. That has a plenum beneath the hearth and the water sits in a kind of reservoir just beneath the grate. It's updraft. Haven't been able to play with that much since winter came so it's still getting tweeked but I start it with a bilge blower sucking air through the hopper. I thought about pressurizing the plenum when it was running with the engine but haven't gotten to that yet.
Hopefully I the next couple months I will get a different gen set built instead of the single cylinder Generac I'm using now. The plan is to pull a 2.9 V-6 out of a junk car I have and mate it to the Miller welder/generator I have. Then the timing can be adapted to different fuel conditions.
No it is super charging the engine. You dont want to try and charge the gasifier it dont work been there done that and it makes a mess.
The blower is powered by the generator and regardless if the generator lobes it dont care and keeps sucking on the gasifier statically to the reaction does not die down while the engine is trying to recover.
Ive had great success just dripping water into the jets. Its as simple as it gets.
Yes that is correct, If I am getting any boost that is a plus but it is not the goal. The goal is keep the reactions more stable. For instance if you have the water drip set and you over load the generator and it dies down, that water drip not automatically change and adapt. So what happens is the reaction dies down and then you have the water drip overwhelming causing more issues. With the blower, it will remain constant even if the generator dies down.
The blower I am is the Amteck blower we have already discussed and linked to. They are perfect for these small single cylinder engines.
Tell me more about the super charger. One of the stumbling blocks I hit when considering these issues is that the air fuel ratio on wood gas is apparently 1 to 1 regardless of the purity of the fuel. Without some way to create a denser gas it seems that it would be detrimental to boost it. It seems like you are talking about super charging the reaction and not the engine intake. Is that right?
Hi Tim, nice you created your first topic here, Fine job!
Yes I do plan to experiment with a number of things this year to boost the gas energy density.
The idea of using pure oxygen is to lower the amount of nitrogen that is normally in the gas due to atmosphere is 70% nitrogen. I plan to first start out with a bottle of Oxygen to meter in small amounts. The higher temps we will benifit from as we will combat that with adding more water for thermal cracking. The hotter the reaction the more water we can crack. So we get a two for one here. Less nitrogen in the gas mix plus more H2 / CO production from adding in more water.
Second phase if it works is to then get an Oxygen concentrator and use the power from the generator to power it. A good Oxygen Concentrator can output around 5 ltrs a minute and will only use around 500 watts.
Additionally we will use an electric super charger this year. This is something you just cant do with raw wood gas as the tar will destroy a super charger or turbo in a heartbeat. The benefit is not just pushing more air gas mix into the engine, there is more. What I found is this adds stability as the electric super charger runs static keeping the reaction stable. This again allows for more water to be thermally cracked. Where otherwise if the gas flows are more oscillating a high flow of water injection can lower combustion temps at the lower end of amplitude and it can not recover. So you are limited to how much water you can drip.
One other simple mod is to get a flywheel key to advance timing.; All of this combined should yield very big gains putting chargas on par with gasoline output all while making the system more efficient as the water input will be greatly increased. I think there maybe a point where water is just as much a fuel input as the charcoal.
Regular wood gas as shown in the WK analysis provides about 50 per cent of the power of gasoline if used in a IC engine according to the experience of most users. The point of this thread is to determine if adding anything to the produced gas will increase it's power output. It is proven that small amounts of water added to the combustion air intake will provide a significant boost so we are providing extra hydrogen and Oxygen. Hydrogen is combustible, Oxygen is an accelerant. This is the simplest effective amendment. I have heard of using oil mixed into the water drip as well as mixed into the charcoal. Not sure how you mix oil into water or what atoms the oil provides when it is broken down. On a gasoline engine the best ways to increase performance is to increase the amount of oxygen in the fuel. I think at one time Matt suggested feeding pure oxygen into the reaction. That should work. I guess the downside is that it would probably melt the reaction vessel. What we need to determine is where this extra oxygen can come from so that it will not overwhelm the reaction.
I have seen a lot of discussion about Wood gas and char gas. Some of it appears pretty conflicting. I haven't read many of the older manuals but the only real data I've seen comes from Wayne Keith. From the analysis he paid for using proven gas, wood gas is
4.24 % CO2
22.38% CO
.06% CH4
.87% O2
22.1% H2
Apparently these are the combustible parts of the gas. I assume the rest is nitrogen or other inert gases.
Other fuels that are used in IC engines.
Methane. CH4
Propane C3H8
Methanol CH3OH
Ethanol C2H6O
Gasoline. C4-C12 This is the carbon number of Gasoline. This chart has other chemical values. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Chemical-and-physical-properties-of-gasoline_tbl1_316708672
Though not a fuel I'm adding nitrous Oxides formula for future reference. N2O
This is just for data purposes. I continue the meat of the matter later.
I dont know what reactions they are talking about in your link: However the wiki link bellow explains the process for gasification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification
Note that when you post a link, you have to highlight the text and a pop up will appear, click the chain link in the menu and then re paste the text in the window and click ok. Yeah I know this forum platform is all Wix has to offer :(
I'm going to have to think about this a while. I'm not seeing how in the intense heat of the reaction the bond between the oxygen atoms is re-established. It has to be that the outside of the reaction core is cool enough to allow it to reform.
https://www.pnas.org/content/109/39/15606
Your sort of getting it. However the water cracking in any gasifier is not just splitting it to H2 and oxygen. This is a reaction process where the Oxygen is ripped out of the molecule and combined with the carbon. So in either case raw wood or charcoal gasification the oxygen from the water does not have a chance to oxidize any fuel in the combustion process. However the CO created can and does get oxidized from the intake air feed. converts to C02 and then re converts back to CO. In a charcoal gasifier reaction the intake air is converted to C02 and the then converted to CO and most if not all of it is converted to CO.
Ok then, back to amending the charcoal. In the WK analysis just about half of the combustible gas comes from CO and H2. Since this is a wood gasifier used in this test and since there is no mention of added water I'm guessing the H2 is gained from the moisture in the raw wood. Understand that I'm just trying to muddle my way through getting a handle on this. With charcoal the addition of water provides a supplemental source of oxygen. Oxygen increases the heat of the reaction but is used up in the process which is why there is less than one per cent free oxygen in the analyzed sample. The higher the heat in the reaction the more the water can be split into just hydrogen and oxygen. Somehow some of the oxygen binds to the carbon and becomes the primary fuel. I'm guessing the hydrogen Is somehow not consumed in the reaction and also passes through as a fuel source. Is that right? If not there is no point to this post because I'm trying to work around to amendments that provide more available hydrogen and oxygen than just water provides.
I guess I'm missing something. On your system, I think the blower is built into the gasifier itself and is run for pre-engine start-up. It it were left running after the engine was drawing gas through the system wouldn't that be the same as pressurizing the intake? I guess the boost blower is there because it's running on AC from the generator. Excuse my density. I'm trying to understand wood gas from the perspective of someone who spent a lot of time milking extra HP from more conventional fuels. There may not be a lot of cross-correlation.
So the blower is feeding into your air intake for the gasifier?
I thought about something in that vein with my Charcoal Gasifier. Did you see that on DOW. The tall red thing with the hearth that was adapted from the Don Mannes unit in his Tracker. That has a plenum beneath the hearth and the water sits in a kind of reservoir just beneath the grate. It's updraft. Haven't been able to play with that much since winter came so it's still getting tweeked but I start it with a bilge blower sucking air through the hopper. I thought about pressurizing the plenum when it was running with the engine but haven't gotten to that yet.
Hopefully I the next couple months I will get a different gen set built instead of the single cylinder Generac I'm using now. The plan is to pull a 2.9 V-6 out of a junk car I have and mate it to the Miller welder/generator I have. Then the timing can be adapted to different fuel conditions.
Yes that is correct, If I am getting any boost that is a plus but it is not the goal. The goal is keep the reactions more stable. For instance if you have the water drip set and you over load the generator and it dies down, that water drip not automatically change and adapt. So what happens is the reaction dies down and then you have the water drip overwhelming causing more issues. With the blower, it will remain constant even if the generator dies down.
The blower I am is the Amteck blower we have already discussed and linked to. They are perfect for these small single cylinder engines.
Tell me more about the super charger. One of the stumbling blocks I hit when considering these issues is that the air fuel ratio on wood gas is apparently 1 to 1 regardless of the purity of the fuel. Without some way to create a denser gas it seems that it would be detrimental to boost it. It seems like you are talking about super charging the reaction and not the engine intake. Is that right?
Hi Tim, nice you created your first topic here, Fine job!
Yes I do plan to experiment with a number of things this year to boost the gas energy density.
The idea of using pure oxygen is to lower the amount of nitrogen that is normally in the gas due to atmosphere is 70% nitrogen. I plan to first start out with a bottle of Oxygen to meter in small amounts. The higher temps we will benifit from as we will combat that with adding more water for thermal cracking. The hotter the reaction the more water we can crack. So we get a two for one here. Less nitrogen in the gas mix plus more H2 / CO production from adding in more water.
Second phase if it works is to then get an Oxygen concentrator and use the power from the generator to power it. A good Oxygen Concentrator can output around 5 ltrs a minute and will only use around 500 watts.
Additionally we will use an electric super charger this year. This is something you just cant do with raw wood gas as the tar will destroy a super charger or turbo in a heartbeat. The benefit is not just pushing more air gas mix into the engine, there is more. What I found is this adds stability as the electric super charger runs static keeping the reaction stable. This again allows for more water to be thermally cracked. Where otherwise if the gas flows are more oscillating a high flow of water injection can lower combustion temps at the lower end of amplitude and it can not recover. So you are limited to how much water you can drip.
One other simple mod is to get a flywheel key to advance timing.; All of this combined should yield very big gains putting chargas on par with gasoline output all while making the system more efficient as the water input will be greatly increased. I think there maybe a point where water is just as much a fuel input as the charcoal.
Regular wood gas as shown in the WK analysis provides about 50 per cent of the power of gasoline if used in a IC engine according to the experience of most users. The point of this thread is to determine if adding anything to the produced gas will increase it's power output. It is proven that small amounts of water added to the combustion air intake will provide a significant boost so we are providing extra hydrogen and Oxygen. Hydrogen is combustible, Oxygen is an accelerant. This is the simplest effective amendment. I have heard of using oil mixed into the water drip as well as mixed into the charcoal. Not sure how you mix oil into water or what atoms the oil provides when it is broken down. On a gasoline engine the best ways to increase performance is to increase the amount of oxygen in the fuel. I think at one time Matt suggested feeding pure oxygen into the reaction. That should work. I guess the downside is that it would probably melt the reaction vessel. What we need to determine is where this extra oxygen can come from so that it will not overwhelm the reaction.
I have seen a lot of discussion about Wood gas and char gas. Some of it appears pretty conflicting. I haven't read many of the older manuals but the only real data I've seen comes from Wayne Keith. From the analysis he paid for using proven gas, wood gas is
4.24 % CO2
22.38% CO
.06% CH4
.87% O2
22.1% H2
Apparently these are the combustible parts of the gas. I assume the rest is nitrogen or other inert gases.
Other fuels that are used in IC engines.
Methane. CH4
Propane C3H8
Methanol CH3OH
Ethanol C2H6O
Gasoline. C4-C12 This is the carbon number of Gasoline. This chart has other chemical values. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Chemical-and-physical-properties-of-gasoline_tbl1_316708672
Though not a fuel I'm adding nitrous Oxides formula for future reference. N2O
This is just for data purposes. I continue the meat of the matter later.