I’ve seen examples of this type of fueled engine running @ antique engine shows in Ct; QVEA has an example. a link to more is as follows :http://www.smokstak.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3767
I’m embarrassed that a fellow New Englander would not remember the great Vermont Castings Owner Outings where they always had a gasification event. One year they powered the Press Tent with wood and several times they had a wood fired bus and other vehicles.
My husband is Norwegian, and he was 5-9 years old in Oslo during WWII. He remembers that most trucks, and many cars of people considered needing them (doctors etc) were fitted with either wood gas generators or “carbid” generators. Methane was produced from burning both the woodchips in the wood gas generator, and the “carbid” powder in the carbid generators. The methane was fed into the engine in somewhat the way fuel injectors work today and was then burned as fuel to run the truck/car engine. The “carbid” was a powder, or crystal, that took up much less room than the woodchips, and was more efficient in producing methane. Cars more often than trucks had this installed. My husband says that pretty much all trucks ran on these generators at that time, and that he and his little friends used to steal the carbid crystals, throw them into a puddle after rain, and set fire to them - they then burned brightly for a while. There’s a Norwegian saying that says, “Need teaches a naked woman to spin…”
I see you got the process. Here is an experiment you can perform. Take a small tin can with a tight lid. Punch a hole (1/8 th. inch or so) in the lid. Then place some wood chip into the can, put the lid back on and put the can over a heat source (camp stove?). As the chips chip heat up you will get smoke and gases coming out of the hole; you can then ignite these gases with a match. The flame will continue to burn until all of the volatiles are driven from the chips. What you hve left are charcoal chips. They same thing can be done with cotton cloth. The charcloth that results will start to smolder when you expose them to sparks from flint and steel. If anyone tries this they should be sure to let the can cool before they open it because the hot char will ignite when the air hits it.
Also,a wood chip car is featured in the John Wayne movie “Donavan’s Reef” (at least I think that is the correct movie)
When you burn a wood, you have flame. It means there are some burning gas comes from wood. During Pacific war in Japan, they had gasoline shortage. They attached a boiler on back of bus. On every morning, bus driver starts fire by wood in the boiler and heat wood to create burning gas. The gas is used on bus engine.
The problem was that its power is much less than by gasoline and passengers pushed bus on up slope.
-caz
My father-in-law in Finland is part of an ag cooperative which grinds waste wood into chips, then gasifies the wood and burn it in a diesel engine to generate electricity for sale. Waste heat produces hot water for heating in the community.
Please read this article. It estimates that there were 900,000 wood powered vehicles running in 1945 at the end of WWII. http://nariphaltan.virtualave.net/gasbook.pdf By the way I thought that one of you guys had a Chemical Engineering degree from one of the prestigious eastern universities. I got mine from Kansas University. It must have been of better value. If any of your industrial process professors are still living they may try to rescind your degrees. I also know how cattle trailer brakes work. We have a lot of them in Kansas. Did you guys ever find out? Dr. Bill
To repeat, neither Tom nor Ray has an engineering or science degree, as far as I know.
Sometime in the long past 60 years or so, I read, perhaps in an old Popular Mechanics or Popular Science magazine, that rural buses in Mexico used to run on wood. I don’t recall reading whether they used the Sterling engine with its external combustion or the wood gas scheme which appears to be what powered Hans’s vehicle.
I also recall reading that there were three classes of travel on those Mexican buses, which ran mostly on dirt roads. The story goes that a young American tourist traveling in Mexico for the first time had the occasion to take one of these buses. He couldn’t speak or read Spanish very well, but seeing posted three different prices for the same route, he tried to ask the ticket seller what the different classes were. Not understanding the answer and seeing that all the seats on the bus were alike, he decided to save money and bought a third class ticket. All went well for about 15 miles, until the bus got stuck in a muddy stretch of the road. Then the driver turned to the passengers and announced, “First class ticket holders, stay seated. Second class riders, get out and walk past the mudhole. Third class, get out and push.”
Tom and Ray, I thoroughly enjoy your show. Keep up the good work.
What’s the matter with you guys? Never heard of wood alcohol? All you need is any vegetable matter, wood chips, sawdust, corn stalks, etc., etc., will do, plus some water. Then you heat the water, above room temperature but below boiling point. wait a while and the mixture will start to ferment. This produces alcohol, methyl (“wood”) alcohol in this case. If you had used a corn, grain or potato mixture (“mash”), you’d get ethyl alcohol, the active ingredient in whiskey, vodka, moonshine, etc.
But now we have to separate the alcohol from the fermented wood chips, etc. This is called distillation which requires some source of heat. Fermentation itself generates some heat but not enough to drive the distillation process. Where does this additional heat come from? Probably from burning some of the wood that you didn’t put into the fermentation vessel. But once the device generates enough gas (vaporized alcohol) to run the ICE, you can use some of the hot exhaust gas from that engine to maintain the reaction.
Is this the wood chip fueled car the caller remembers from WWII? Something like it probably. But the device i describe above should work. Try it.
Sheesh, I thought everyone knew about wood burning vehicles. During WWII fuel was scarce. I suppose you city folks didn’t have access to a lot of wood chips, but farmers and people in small timber towns sure did. I’m too young, but my father and grandfather have told me about it. The chips weren’t digested, that would take forever. But if you burn wood inefficiently it produces a whole host of combustible gasses. Those were drawn off from the burner and sucked into the carburetor. A lot of those old truck and tractor engines were slower and lower powered than modern ones. They surely ran better on gas, but they’d run on about anything. I grew up with two tractors (JD models H and B) which had a small “starting tank” and a larger “fuel tank”. The engine would be started on gas, then when it warmed up it was switched to the fuel tank which held just about anything that would burn. I’m sure those tractors would have run on wood smoke, too, if we had a burner.
My dad talked about fireboxes people put in the trunks of cars, especially taxis, in Salt Lake City with a big tube going to the intake manifold during the war because gasoline was so scarce. As others have said it burned coal using inadequate oxygen thus producing producer gas. He said the rings wore out fast, presumably from the minerals in the coal and possibly from the toluene and other solvents from the destructive distillation of coal. Contrary to the tappet brothers, much carbon monoxide was produced and it burns nicely. I never found out how they got an appropriate air mixture. Presumably destructive distillation of wood with CO from low oxygen burning of cellulose would work, but again with problems with minerals.
During the war most cars in Sweden ran on woodgas, because of oil shortage, I drive on Biogas (methane gas made from household garbage) myself
Heard this wood chip story yesterday and today I find this quote in the current book I’m reading, titled “A Footsoldier For Patton” by Michael C Bilder. I’m reading it because my dad was also in Patton’s Army and I wanted to hear the story from the soldiers point of view, rather than another historian.
Here is the quote, “The Germans not only developed V (vengeance) rockets and jets: they were also geniuses at modifying everyday vehicles, mostly trucks, to run on steam. I saw one that had a small stove-like contraption in the rear that burned wood. The wood in turn provided steam, which generated enough power to drive the vehicle. It was amazing!”
Love your show!
Ritmarita, the soldier involved was not an engineer or chemist, and had never seen a gassifier on a car. He only THOUGHT the unit produced steam. Smoke yes, methane gas yes, steam no. The gas was burned in the gasoline engine in lieu of gasoline.
Read all about it!
Within the last six months I read an article (somewhere?) which elaborated about these wood burning cars. Evidently this technique was also used here in the U.S. during the depression, when fuels for the few vehicles people were able to afford were in short supply or they were just plain too expensive. I recall a photo of a farmer sitting in an old pick up type truck and a caption elaborating about how these work vehicles were transformed into wood burners so they could still be used. I also got the impression that these vehicles would burn actual pieces of wood, like we use in a fire place, not just wood chips, and it also gave me the impression that conversion back to a gasoline burning combustion engine was a fairly simple procedure. Perhaps next week you guys should address the practicality of the Flintstone mobile? Love your show!..
The system used to run cars with wood chips is a wood gasifier. It has been used in many parts of the world, whenever other fuels for internal combustion engines have not been available. The chemical process is pyrolysis, in which wood is heated at high temperature in an oxygen-deprived atmosphere so that it does not burn, but breaks down into combustible gaseous compounds, particularly hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. The resulting gas is called wood gas or producer gas. It can be mixed with air and burned in an internal combustion engine.
FEMA has free plans for construction of a gasifier to power a tractor in a time of fuel shortage - see the attached file.
Before natural gas became widely available, many communities had municipal wood gas plants and the gas was used for lighting.
During WWII VW produced a version of a small military car with a gasifier built in.
Gasifiers are now gaining usage for disposal of combustible solid waste. The resulting gas is used to power generators and produce energy.
I saw that it was posted already but I went and signed up just to comment before I saw it… so I’m posting it here anyway! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQT3ya7BCQ Video of a group making a wood gasifier to survive from the show The Colony.