The gasifier
Post date: Jan 28, 2013 2:2:21 AM
A few of these posts are being done months after the work was done. The gasifier is a slightly modified design based off a design called the Victoria.
After spending several months reading posts to the woodgas group on yahoo this design looked like it would be fairly easy to build and should handle the chipped wood we have available.
This is our gasifier before the lid was added and before it was painted. Our is 8" in diameter where the Victoria was made from 6" pipe. At this point the CNC machine wasn't working so the discs and donut shapes were all cut out of sheet steel with a 4" grinder. The end product looks OK but isn't all that precise. Thanks to Greg Wright for doing the welding and to Morgan Tartakoff for bending the metal for the lid handle.(picture yet to be taken).
The air jets
This looking down into the burn tube of the gasifier. There are three pipes about 5" above the restriction opening and a fourth a bit lower that points to the center of the restriction. The opening in the pipes is 1/8" for now.
How it works.
The top portion of the gasifier is filled with wood chips or chunks of wood. For testing purposes we have made up a bunch of charcoal we will use in place of the wood chunks so we won't need to worry about making tar as that has been burned out in the making of the charcoal.
The chips at the bottom of the pile are ignited and air is pulled using a vacuum down through the air jets. This created a very hot fire in a small space. Smoke is created an sucked out of the lower section. The smoke contains carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, hydrogen, ash, water vapor and other gases. This gas is run through a cyclone to remove ash and then a cooler to condense out moisture and a final filter to get anything missed earlier. The gas is then mixed with air and fed into the carburator of an engine. This wood gas/air mixture can replace the gasoline/air mixture and run an engine at 50% to 75% of the power it would have if run on gasoline.
More pictures of the completed gasifier will be in future posts.