Woodgas Vehicles: I saw the post from 1957Bolens and he asked me to weigh in. Not only was Hans right, but so were about one million European drivers. During WWII gasoline use for civilian purposes was very restricted in Europe (and Australia/New Zealand too). The Imbert factory in Cologne made nearly a half-million conversion units before the war ended. When I worked for Mother Earth News back in 1979 thru early 1980s we build several designs, with vehicles and a sawmill, and a 12 kW generator all running on domino-sized and larger chunks of wood. The process involves controlling oxygen access to the burning chamber through proper design/sizing of air inlet jets. The pyrolysis of wood essentially super-heats it without consuming it, and the product is not smoke, but a pyro-chemically created Hydrogen, Carbon Monoxide, Methane, and Carbon Dioxide, all generated from the wood hydrocarbon. The rest is mostly Nitrogen, which does not combust. The physical residue is a bio-rich char. The technology has been around for 200 years but was more perfectly developed in the 1920s by an engineer named Georges Imbert. The gas needs to be cooled and filtered, but it will run through the intake manifold circuit of an internal combustion engine with surprisingly few problems, other than more frequent filter/cleaning maintenance. I have worked with small-scale straight alcohol fuels and wood gas, methane, and other gasoline fuel alternatives. The wood gas is reasonably reliable and inexpensive, and it takes less than 20 pounds of wood to replace a gallon of gasoline. With the cost and future availability of cheap petroleum on the wane, I believe we will all be hearing more about wood gas as time goes on.
Where’s all the wood going to come from?
Reminds me of a drive through northern California in the winter, the woods were choked with all the smoke from the wood burning fireplaces and stoves - not my idea of ‘green’.
RE: texases’ post. Once the conversion from solid wood to combustible gas is made in the closed chamber and burned in the engine the emissions are very low. This is not smoke we are talking about, but a combustible gas. And as far as the wood supply, we have multiple tons of wood and biomass going to waste. There should be no need to set up tree plantations for wood, plus the entire population is not going to convert from gasoline to wood gas. It is a transition fuel.
We use about 140 billion gallons of gas per year. If only 10% switched to wood, that’d be 14 billion gallons X 20 pounds of wood/gallon = 280 BILLION pounds (140 million tons) of wood per year. So where’s that much wood coming from? Total wood consumption in the US is only about 700 billion pounds of wood perr year, so you’re talking about increasing wood consumption by 40% to meet 10% of our gasoline use. That’ll have MAJOR negative impacts on the forests, it would seem to me.
Back in the late 70’s I helped a returning Peace Corp volunteer raise money to apply this technology in Africa because gas was so high. It was shipped in in 55 gallon drums. And the drums were just abandoned in the jungle.
Anyway, When wood is heated in an air-tight container, a whole range of alcohols, phenols, and other volitle chemicals are given off. These are piped to the engine, and a straight tube feeds these as gasses directly into the intake. The carburateur is removed. It works best in a low compression engine. It also fairly quickly guns up the engine, unless one uses a scrubber. Hard wood works better than the tarrier soft woods. The particular units he was using came from Sweden, and were WW2 war surplus. They were called gasogens Traditional charcoal making used these flamable gasses to heat the wood to turn it into charcoal. I would guess modern charcoal makers still do so, but don’t know.
Two more notes. When you do the same process with soft coal (bituminous) one gets a product that can be refined into gasoline. Germany in WW2 made about 60% of their gasoline that way. As recently as the 80’s South Africa used similar processes to make gasoline when oil was embargoed to them due to Apartheit. It costs more than using petroleum, but it will work when you don’t have access to oil. That is the process for making coke for steel making, so the it is just useing a by-product that would otherwise be burned off.
During WW2 many British Taxis and busses had gas ballons (almost as much volume as the vehicle) mounted on their roofs which held cooking gas to power the autos. My father-in-law worked his way through university (higher technical school) in chemistry tending a cooking gas plant. A bed of coal was heated to red-hot, using coal, then live steam was passed over the hot coal. The water is broken down and recombines with the carbon in the coal. The products of the reaction are hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. (2 H2O + 2 C yeild H2 +2 CO).
This is why they always add a strong odor to cooking gas–it is extremely poisonous. When ignited, the cooking gas hydrogen burns, igniting the carbon monoxide to turn it into carbon dioxide. Adding the second oxagen to the carbon monoxide still had about 70% of the total energy release of going straight from carbon to carbon dioxide. Plus the hydrogen adds some thermal value. Plus, it is now a gas and easily transported through pipes to an entire city.
Most European cities used “cooking gas” (also called “water gas”) made this way before WW2, and of course during the war, since only military technology changed during the war.
Yes, it is entirely possible and a fairly low tech solution. This is fully in keeping with the current suggestion to use natural gas, which is cheap and abundant to power our cars, as suggested by Pickins. Netherlands has many cars gunning on natural gas, since they have abundant natural gas and have to import oil.
Hope this helps answer the problem. Ask any older chemist and he can even give you the full formulas. (Email is a poor medium in which to write chemical formulas.)
Does anyone else think the wood-chip burning car sounds EXACTLY like the Car Dealership guy with the dead dog? Remember that story from years past? A woman comes into his dealership for car service, leaves the car. The dealer see’s the car is left in the garage overnight, and looks to find a dead dog in the back seat. Horrified, he rushes out to buy a new dog, hoping to fool the dog’s owner. Actually, the dog was already dead and the woman was taking it to the pet cemetary. Anyway, the two men both have accents and voices that sound almost exactly alike. I wonder, are they the same person? If so, this guy has some great stories!
My dad was a supply sergeant in a combat infantry battalion in World War II and he and a buddy used a captured Opel Blitz as their personal RV during the war (after painting white stars on the doors). (They even kept a pet dog.)
They converted it back to gasoline, which my dad, due to his job, had access to.
Another wartime trick was when they were in area where fires were not allowed, they’d make their coffee by dumping it into a jeep radiator and running it up and down a nearby hill. They’d also cook on hot engine blocks.
I think the wood gas trick is called pyrolysis, which generates hydrogen and burns in engines.
It’s not a digester and there is no alcohol or methane produced. Can you imagine having to wait long enough for woodchips to rot and ferment to create methane? You’d get about 10 miles per month. Wood burning vehicles do not run on methane. It’s a wood gas generator. The woodchips are partly burned to make what is essentially charcoal gas; mostly nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It burns pretty much the same as natural or LP gas and has enough energy to power an internal combustion engine. Jeeze.
My grandfather was bus driver just after the war. Many of the busses of these days had gasoline engines, so they could easily be converted to wood gas. An extension was welded onto the end of the frame and the gas generator was placed there which was as tall as the bus.
When you drive a wood gas powered bus you need to get up a bit earlier in the morning to light a fire in the gas generator and load your day’s supply of wood onto the roof of the bus. Once the generator has reached operating temperature you close off most of the air supply (You don’t want the wood to burn more than is necessary to keep the process going). Then, you can start driving.
Once in a while you need to stop, klimb onto the roof of the bus and put another 100 pounds of wood into the generator. Especially at the bottom of a steep hill it is essential to ensure that the generator is performing well if you want to avoid to stall out halfway up. This is embarassing with a bus load of passengers who would have to wait until there is enough gas again to continue driving.
At the end of the day you need to spend another hour to cut the wood for the next day to building block size.
They were very quick to convert these busses back to gasoline once gasoline was available again.
In my part of this great country which is Lancaster Co. Pa . in 1980’s a local farmer had a truck that run on wood chips . His slogan was " Goes 1 mile on 8" of 2 X 4". This unit was made at a local machine shop and was a updraft design .
Wood gas was often used in Europe during WWII due to the lack of gasoline. Just type in “wood gas” in any search engine and the answer will pop up. Wikapedia has an excellent explaination. There are still some engines in use today.
SLOWGROUT Jan 11
if the brothers were dry on this one that is because they are baby boomers and their Papa did not tell them the war stories. Hans knew about it from his side of the Rhine; the Frenchies had even less petrol than the occupier but lots of wood. Yes Leave early, gazogene is the french word indeed; Citroen was not a joke in those days. And still working in 2005! Nowadays only super efficient high temperature burning wood stoves work on the same principle with barely any ash residue.
There’s a movie called “The Longest Hundred Miles” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061917/) about an American soldier in the Philippines during WWII who converts a school bus to run on burning coconut shells to help some refugees escape from the advancing Japanese.
@dfellman - my parents were in the Phillipines in 1941, were captured by the Japanese that December, and were transported TO the prison camp in just such a bus (coconut shells included)! Fortunately they were civillians and survived their ordeal.
In Australia 1939-1944 we had severe petrol (gasoline) rationing and the government encouraged all vehicle owners, autos, tractors, busses, delivery trucks etc to convert to producer gas gasifiers. The government issued design guides, plans and many companies sold addon systems and folks built their own! my father had one on his ford V8 in 1942 (I have a photo) By 1946, over 72,000 vehicles were retro fitted, and even the Australian Standards Insitute issued design and performance guidelines.
Fuel used was charcoal, coke, straw, even peat as well as wood chips, dripping water on a less than stoicametric air fuel ratio, generated additional hydrogen leading to about 60-70% power of gasoline. Fuel composition is 50% nitrogen, 28% CO, 15% Hydrogen, 5% CO2 and 2% methane by analysis (charcoal and water fuel)
Check with motherearthnews.com for laymans description analysis and get a publication reprint on “How to” from Lindsaybks.com.
It is on my bucket list to build one and use it daily!
MIT was it, huh…
Translated from swedish wikipedia
Gengas (shorthand for generatorgas) (wood gas) is a gas generated by incomplete combustion of wood or coal . It consists mainly of carbon monoxide , hydrogen , methane and carbon dioxide . Gengasen is due to its content of carbon monoxide toxicity before it is burned. Before gengasen enters the engine needs to be purified. This is done traditionally in four steps:
Cyclone filter: the gas flows into a cyclone where higher soot - and ash particles by centrifugal swirling down into a container while the gas continues out.
Water bath: the gas is scrubbed in the water in which acids and less ash particles are dissolved.
Cooling: the gas passes through a condenser which condenses out water and reduces the gas volume (like an intercooler ), which means that more combustible gas can fit in the engine.
Cork Filter: filter absorbs more water, ash particles and tars from the gas.
Today we experimented with new filters that work more efficiently and are easier to handle. [Citation needed]
Wood gas offers high efficiency . Mikkonen has carefully examined the wood gas as fuel for cars in his book “Wood gas for mobile applications”. In practical experience have 1000 kg wood replaced the 385 liters of gasoline during normal daily use of the same unmodified car.
This means that the energy requirement for a vedgasbil becomes 1.54 x higher compared with the same car run on gasoline, but no fuel processing is needed. The comparison takes into account both heating as extra weight of the wood gas heaters. Current efficiency of a wood gas generator is 75%. Exhaust emissions are also minimal. The exhaust gas analysis has shown that carbon monoxide is less than 0.3% and emissions of hydrocarbons is less than 15 ppm without a catalytic converter. Modern wood-gas system also works well with air-dried wood and peat.
Wood gas, no emission regulations, all cars regardless of model year and type may be converted and recorded (Sweden). The engine is counted as a wood gas engine, not as a gasoline or diesel engine emission regulations.
My mother owned one of those. Attached is a scan of a news story about a model. Email me (dendresdner@yahoo.com) if you need a translation. I’m just heading out the door, can’t give more info right now.
On the Discovery Channel show “The Colony,” about an experiment where the people where put in a realistic end of the world type situation, the people actually built a wood gasifier to run their electricity as well as their vehicles. Here is a link to see how they did it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQT3ya7BCQ
Here is a URL for an article in the Japanese Wikipedia - hopefully you can see photo images:
The “Mokutan”(Wood coal) automobile ( mostly bus) was used in the war and post war era for the lack of gasoline supply. The article described the engine power as much lower than that of gasoline fuel. So, the passenger had to get off and help push the bus going uphill. The gas, mostly CO and a bit of H2, leaked out and caused CO poisoning to some passengers. I thought this “technology” may come back last year, after March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear melt down disaster, when the gasoline supply logistics was much affected. In Tokyo area, it took two weeks to return to normal.
“Rocket City Rednecks” did a show with this technology: Season 1, Episode 15
http://www.tv-links.eu/_gateway.html?data=MjgzNjU0MQ==
About 3:20 into the show.