Running a sawmill Engine with wood gas???

[Dominican]

Is there anyone running a sawmill  engine with a wood gassifier, some plans to make one, a place to buy one???

[sawguy21]

Paul H built a wood gas truck, tons of information and pictures on that thread.

[Kansas]

The problem I see with that is that it is more trouble than its worth, unless your turning a big engine. Can it be done? Yes. Can it be done economically? Not unless your turning a bigger motor. My guess is at least a 300 or better horsepower. Exception would be if diesel or gas was not much of an option at your location.

Check Yahoo. Search for chat rooms that have to do with gasification units. As stated earlier, there is a fair amount of knowledge here on the forum.

[jimparamedic]

I have kicked around trying to run my saw mill with wood gas.Was thinking of using a 20 horse hit and miss. Or 345 international engine I have. But I wonder if if a meth digester would not work better. Or maybe steam. I would love to have water close than I would go that way. There is alot of ways to get power. But when it comes down to it ,There is no such thing as free power.

[Al_Smith]

Just as a general statement  it's doubtfull you can achieve nearly as much power using a gasifier as gasoline. Thus the statement of a 300 HP engine to start out with .

Some of these methods which indeed do have merit lack in practicality. They will work of course and are ingenious to say the least.

However it comes down to does a person really want to expend the time ,money and energy to make it happen ?

Great ideas abound from great thinkers .Very admirable .Fact if a person really wanted to you can convert garbage to crude oil using heat and pressure vessel .Then use a simple vacuum distillation unit to make low grade gasoline.How practical is it though?

[luap]

during the years ofwwll FEMA published a paper with plans to build a gassifer designed to run a ford 8 or9n tractor I printed it off but don't have a link to it and very unikley I could find my copy but that may be enough info to google it. one safety consideration, several people were killed by co2 poisoning as they parked the machine near a building and the draft pulled the fumes into the living space, you can turn the engine off but it keeps producing the wood gas.

[Don P]

I've seen that paper online. It's been awhile but I believe that one didn't "crack" the tar and was not good for long term running.

Someone mentioned using a hit and miss. I've been reading the operators manual for one that was donated to the museum. Best I can tell the compression ratio is 4:1 and it sounds like they ran on a number of fuels, gasoline, kerosene, solar oil...what the heck is solar oil?, and gas, which back then usually means "town gas", wood gas wouldn't be far from it.

The manual goes on the explain pulling the 4 ring piston every 6 months and cleaning it and the cylinder, more frequently if using heavy fuel with soot. That would be a relatively easy job, you're looking at the crank and connecting rod exposed. It might take a piston the size of a 5 gallon pail to run a mill on woodgas with one of those though.

[chet]

 Best I can tell the compression ratio is 4:1 and it sounds like they ran on a number of fuels, gasoline, kerosene, solar oil...what the heck is solar oil?

It appears Google only heard of solar oil in little bottles used for finger nails.  :D  If I had to guess, I would say it was some form of bio diesel. 

[peakbagger]

FYI Wood Gas is mostly carbon monoxide, odorless and colorless. Many home brew designs are not particularly gas tight so the operators tend to get dosed with it when operating. The only way to generate it easily is with small uniform dry wood, otherwise its full of water vapor. The BTU content of CO is 1/4 that of propane (BTU?LB basis) so the engine will be way down on power. Might be worth considering a turbo or supercharger to force more fuel into the combustion chamber.  

[Al_Smith]

It was decades ago I think Mother Earth News had a gasifier using a Pontiac Tempest engine .It didn't take very long to wear that thing out the way they did it .They used gasifiers in England in WW2 .They got by some how .It's another one of those"  prepper " things which depends on how you look at it .
Now Eustace Conway on the TV  show mountain men has some wonderful ideas  but keep in mind those reality TV shows are scripted and sensationalized .This is 2022 not 1872 .That said I get a hoot about some of the things that  show comes up with ,which do work .I wonder if Wallace the mule is still alive .

[TW]

My uncle has an old wood gasifyer standing by the door inside a barn. It was taken out of use when the war ended in 1944 and put aside for future needs. One day it may come in handy. It was used to power the inboard engine of a coastal fishing boat.

I have discussed woodgas with some old men who had been lorry drivers during the war. They said that you get a little more than half the power you would get from the same motor running on petrol. A mayor problem was the inferrior gas filters used at the time. Plenty of small soot particles passed through the filters and into the motor where they wore out the piston rings an cylinders and leaked into the oil where they were hard on the bearing surfaces.There are better filters today and modern downdraft gasifyers are said to produce slightly cleaner gas so this may be less of an issue today.
Woodgas makes you doze off and die without knowing it if it get's into the air you breathe in too high concentrations. Because of the shortage of rubber during the war there were plenty of accidents when rotten hoses started to leak inside the engine compartment and the gas found it's way into the cab.

[moodnacreek]

For some reason I thought the lack of fuel after ww 2 in Europe had them burning coal for gas for gasoline engines.

[Al_Smith]

I heard charcoal .However England has or had plenty of coal so with some creativity it could be burned into coke and use the gas off of it .During the industrial revolution they used "producer gas" taken from the blast furnaces to power huge engines in the steel mills .One of my books shows a giant engine made by Allis-Chalmers that took three gondola cars to ship it .Those engines were horizontal cylinder types of the Coreless or Cooper_Bessemer design . 
So it's not weather it would work or not because that's already been proven .What would work in 1890 or 1942 will still work .Then comes the question is it really worth the effort ?

[TW]

In Finland it was all about woodgas. Produced directly from small pieces of wood called "knåbilar" in our dialect of Swedish and fed directly into the gas generator of busses and lorries and the very few cars there were. "Knåbilar" were produced usually by old men who weren't strong enough for other work at strathegic places along the roads and supplied to passing vehicles.

Private cars were with very very few exceptions either requisitioned for the war effort and converted to woodgas or put is storage in some barn. Some farm tractors were converted to woodgas but some were put in storage while horses did the farmwork. Stationary engines were either converted to woodgas or replaced with electric motors. In late autumn when the village thresher was running with it's huge Strömberg three phase motor connected by clamps directly on the power line the lamps were flickering in half the village every time the clip on the drive belt passed over a pulley and when the thresher was started after a break the lamps went almost dark.
This is the history behind the extensive three phase grid in Finland with three phase 400 volt from the pole to almost every home. The need became obvious during and after the war and as soon as the wartime shortages were over the process of modernizing the grid started.

In central Europe they usually fed their woodgas generators with charcoal made from wood in a separate process.

The Germans had factories making a sort of synthetic petrol from native lignite. The process was both dangerous for the workers and unfriendly to the environment but nazis don't care about such things. This fuel was strictly reserved for military and gestapo needs and for nazi officials swashbuckling around in swanky Mercedes cars. Though small amounts found it's way to Finland and was used by the army for it's most pressing needs. It is a bit impractical to mount a woodgas generator onto a tank.

I don't think the English used very much woodgas. They got petrol by sea from abroad and they had a shortage of timber.

I have never heard of coal gas being used as vehicle fuel.

[wisconsitom]

Fascinating discussion.  Are you guys saying CO can be a fuel?  

[peakbagger]

Yes CO  will burn, burn carbon incompletely and it forms CO (carbon Monoxide) then burn CO and it yields CO2. CO will not burn unless its heated above 1150 degrees. Many wood gas units would use gas to start and then transition to wood gas. 

Wood stoves burning poorly dried wood frequently do not get hot enough to fully burn CO. Modern stoves either use a catalyst to drop the ignition temp of the CO or put in secondary burn system to burn hot enough to get the temp up over the 1150. Even with the right temp, there needs to be turbulence to thoroughly mix preheated secondary air with CO to combust fully. 

[Don P]

Fascinating discussion.  Are you guys saying CO can be a fuel?  Makes me wonder, what about CO2, with twice the carbon...

CO2 has twice the O's, the same single carbon atom.
Carbon has 4 bonding sites, O has 2. CO2 is full and happy, CO is desperately looking for another O. In an iron furnace CO strips an O from ferric oxide, FeO, and leave pure Fe, molten iron, in its wake.
I've gotten as far as generating and lighting a flare from charcoal but got distracted before fabbing a filter and hooking it to an old generator as a SHTF power supply.

[wisconsitom]

Yeah was going to correct my own mistake-ya beat me to it Don🥴.  (Note to self-leave the forum alone while engaged in 2 or 3 projects).

I'm an old hand at benzene rings😆.

[Al_Smith]

I won't  into details but on the u-boats we made our own O2 to breath from sea water .In the process the hydrogen and CO   were actually burned .and the remainder was passed through a scrubber which further purified it .So yes CO will burn under the right conditions .CO will also kill you under the right conditions .The human body by design can do a lot of amazing  things but it cannot separate CO from O2 .

[Joe Hillmann]

Fascinating discussion.  Are you guys saying CO can be a fuel?  Makes me wonder, what about CO2, with twice the carbon...

Co2, can kind of be made in to fuel.  Feed co2 from the exhaust back into the hot charcoal bed and the charcoal will. Strip one o from the co2 and give you 2 co's.  The water in the exhaust gets stripped of its o as well and become one H and 2 co's.
The reason for doing that is because cracking h20 and co2 takes a lot of energy and keeps you charcoal bed cool enough that a ceramic or stainless inlet pipe will last more than a couple minutes without burning up.
It is more important with a charcoal gasafier than a wood one.  A wood gasifier produces all sorts of things that get cracked when they get sucked through the heat of the charcoal bed and that cracking keeps it cool.
A charcoal gasifier is easier to make and run than wood, and doesnt produce any tar so filtering is much easier.