The valve ensures that I can completely seal off the gasifier when it is shut down. I probably have more ideas than I can try out in 10 lifetimes. Great post! Wood gas generators often use wood; however, charcoal can also be used as a fuel. The Latest. That is a oyt of tar production.

It was cut from a 6 in to 4 in steel AC duct reduction fitting. It slips down over the reaction tube and gets siliconed to the top of the flange.

A single air inlet fitting will be installed on the side of the manifold. I used a Tee fitting. One leg of the Tee goes into the manifold.

One leg has a hose fitting installed that I can use to inject compressed air. The third leg of the tee is plugged for now. My idea here was that I could start the gasifier on compressed air, then once it was running, I could unscrew the plug, and let engine vacuum pull air through the gasifier from whatever engine the gasifier eventually gets connected to.

Everything is all buttoned up and sealed with yet more great gobs of red silicone gasket material. I failed to do a lot of basic research about gasification before just diving in and trying to build a gasifier. So I wound up repeating a lot of the same mistakes other people made before me. So this gasifier went through many versions, re-designs and re-builds before getting to this state. One early mistake I made was poor initial choice of fuel.

It turns out gasifiers are finicky about what you feed them. They like fuels that are uniform in both particle size, shape and composition. Non-uniform fuels produce lots of gunky tars.

My first choice of fuel was about as bad as it gets. I tried to run the first version of the gasifier on wood mulch. I know of at least three places I pass on a regular basis that have signs offering free wood chip mulch to anyone who would come and haul it away. There are probably dozens of other sources I could find with a little research. So I got myself a bag of wood chip mulch.

The chips were very wet. So here I am drying them with a fan. After 2 weeks under the fan, they were bone dry and ready to burn in the gasifier. I realized that if this worked, I'd have to find a less energy intensive way of drying the wood chips in the future. But it didn't work. The gasifier didn't really work at all on wood chips.

The non-uniform size and shape of the chips, combined with their mystery composition led to terrible problems. The chips didn't feed right, didn't burn right, didn't pyrolize right, and often wouldn't even burn at all.

When the gasifier was running on these chips I got far more tar than gas out if it. Out of frustration I hit the books to try and figure out what the problem was. That's when I learned about gasifier fuel needing to be uniform to work well. So I started groping around for a better fuel option. Unfortunately I live in Florida, and nobody burns wood pellets here.

They are essentially impossible to obtain here. So I settled on hay pellets. I could get them from feed stores. They are more expensive than I would have liked, but they didn't break the bank for testing purposes. The gasifier worked much better on hay pellets. There was more gas and less tar. The pellets fed nicely through the reaction tube and exited as little beads of char. I could start seeing the potential of this machine. On one of my trips to my Arizona property, I bought back two 40 pound bags of wood pellets.

They were dirt cheap too. I couldn't find them to save my life in Florida. Every hardware and homecenter store in Arizona seems to carry them though. Later I also found them on a trip to the North Georgia mountains, and brought back some more. Now I have plenty of high quality fuel for test running the gasifier. Fortunately I drive out to Arizona twice a year. So bringing a few 40lb bags of wood pellets back home on each trip in my big truck was not a problem. The gasifier runs even better on the wood pellets than on the hay pellets.

The wood pellets are designed to be a fuel after all. The more or less uniform size, shape and composition of the pellets is just what is needed for good gasification.

Wood pellets are also dirt cheap if you can find them. Air must flow through the gasifier for it to operate properly. In normal operation, the manifold vacuum of whatever engine the gasifier is connected to will pull air through the gasifier and keep the reaction going. When first starting up a cold gasifier, or testing a unit not attached to an engine, there must be another method of forcing air through the gasifier.

It is usually used to start the gasifier, then once running, the vacuum from the intake of the engine the gasifier is meant to power keeps the gas flowing. I initially chose this method too. This blower is a little under powered. However, it was the only all metal blower I could find at the time. Most blowers these days are full of plastic parts.

The plastic would melt at the temperatures the gasifier operates at. So I made do with my undersized blower. I actually had some success with it. The blower worked, but it was very undersized. To get good performance out of the gasifier I knew I was going to have to increase the air flow.

I looked into buying a larger blower, but powerful all-metal models were rare and very expensive. I have an endless supply of compressed air in my workshop. So why not blow compressed air through the gasifier, rather than using a blower to pull it through?

So I scrounged up a pressure regulator, a valve and some hose and hooked it all up. This is the idea that forced building the manifold to connect the inlets of all the j-tubes together several steps back. I am using a piece cut from a silicone cooking sheet as a heat shield to protect the hose from melting where it touches the hot drum. The compressed air really worked great. The gasifier starts up almost instantly, and gets much hotter than before. The quality of the gas has greatly improved.

Eventually I had the gasifier working well. It was making lots of gas and hardly any tar. Everything was working great. The gasifier was producing a huge volume of gas. The problem is that this gas is flammable and toxic. I needed to burn or flare off the gas to keep it from being an explosion or health hazard. Just lighting the jet of gas coming out of the outlet pipe of the gasifier didn't really work very well because the wind would quickly blow out the flame. I decided I needed a better way of flaring off the gas.

So I bodged together a quick and dirty gas burner. My flare stack is made from an old tin can and a stainless steel vegetable steamer.

I just drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of an 18 ounce steel can, and bolted it on top of the gas outlet pipe. I then put an old stainless steel vegetable steamer over the open top of the can. It works great as a burner. The flame doesn't blow out even in very strong wind gusts.

I increased the stack height to prevent the heat from the burner from cooking the rubber and silicone parts on top of the gasifier. It is just an old 18 ounce bean can with lots of air holes punched in the bottom. It sits on top of the outlet pipe of the gasifier and the gas enters through a large hole in the center of the can bottom.

The top of the can is open. The gas and air mix inside the can. There are three screws that go into the can. The steamer is wired to these screws with stainless steel wire to keep it in place.

This setup works great as a gas burner. It didn't cost anything and took almost no time to build. The burner holds the flame even in very strong winds. My method of starting up the gasifier takes a few minutes, but it starts producing relatively clean gas quickly.

This sort of charcoal starts easily and burns very hot. Briquettes might work, but I haven't tried them. They would need to be broken up into small pieces. The lump charcoal is soft and breaks up easily. Here the bits have been placed in a stainless steel vegetable steamer and I am using a propane torch to start the charcoal burning. The small bits of charcoal rapidly catch and quickly heat up.

Once the charcoal is good and hot, I dump enough down the reaction tube to fill it from the shaker grate up to the j-tubes. The bed of hot charcoal in the bottom of the reaction tube really jump starts the gasification process. At this point I can open the valves and start the air flow. Within a couple of minutes the gas coming out the flare stack will support combustion. The gasifier is not "done" yet.

It may never be done because there are so many modifications I want to try out. There are a few big ideas I have for the not too distant future. Here are some of my future plans, not in any particular order. I still have the goal of using the gasifier to run an engine. I have come a long way in reducing the amount of tar the gasifier produces, but will need to further clean the gas before feeding it into an engine.

The remaining tar and any particulates will need to be removed from the gas. So I need to build a scrubbing system, or cyclone separator. The gas should also be cooled before feeding it into an engine.

So a radiator or other cooler will need to be added to the system. I am very seriously considering rebuilding the central core of the gasifier using ceramic materials. The hotter the reaction zone can get, the better the gasification process works.

The stainless steel reaction tube absorbs a lot of heat and conducts it away from the reaction zone. Ceramic materials don't conduct heat like metal, and can handle much higher temperatures without melting.

I want to build an automatic shaking system for the shaker grate. I want to build a moisture removal system for the fuel hopper section. As the fuel moves down the reaction tube, toward the reaction zone, it heats up and moisture is driven out of it.

This moisture then condenses on the cool upper section of the tube, and makes the fuel there damp. Damp fuel doesn't burn or gasify well. I have an idea for an auger feed system to keep the fuel hopper topped off from a larger pellet bin. And maybe another auger system to remove accumulated ash and char from the bottom of the drum. With these in place, the gasifier could run indefinitely. I am considering installing diesel engine glow plugs in the reaction zone so the gasifier can be started electrically.

I'd like to someday build a larger version of the gasifier that could power a vehicle like a car or truck. These are just a few of my ideas. I probably have more ideas than I can try out in 10 lifetimes. Question 2 years ago. What about using a large flat panel magnifying glass focused on a tungsten Archimedes screw to gasifiy wet algae biomass?

This is a great intractable but I have one question, in the air manifold for the J-tubes are the J-tubes connected with pipe which is connected to the T-fitting or does the T-fitting just pipe air directly into the manifold which goes into the J-tubes. I'm thinking about trying a scaled up version of this to produce gas not for use in an engine, but to generate steam. Great post! I figure that as like attracts like, and with experience of the amazing oil bath Land Rover air filter, my intended build will use a light oil bath filter with a load of steel turnings to break up the coarser bubbles to remove the tars.

A 1 meter long 75mm pipe crammed with steel turnings thereafter should take care of the minuscule amount of hydrogen sulfide. I always thought you could take the exhaust from the engine you were trying to run and run the hot gases the light your gasifier by using a pipe.

I honestly don't know all the running temperatures here and if it would even be hot enough. But I think I'll spend some time looking into it. I saw an article in Mother Earth News about running the "Producer gas" through a barrel of loose hay to catch the tar b4 feeding it to a pickup truck engine.

I love your design and am at awe in how painstaking you've been documenting your discoveries. You inspired me to attempt my own, working from your successes. You will need to remove sulfur compounds if you wish to run an engine. I've been reading up on early sulfur-removal techniques for gas streams Let me know when I can come visit and have a larger model installed by you on my Jeep Wrangler I'm willing to pay for parts and booze. Seriously, nice build, I'm jealous of your skills.

But it never states where in the fuel column the flame is. I'd think you'd want the flame at the top, so that the heated air would do pyrolysis on the wood below as the sucking air pulls the flames down.

Does anybody know if this is actually how a simple biomass gassifier works? Reply 6 years ago on Introduction. If I remember correctly, the FEMA version lets the air flow directly down through the biomass that's to be burned? That does work, but by modifying the design to use air inlet tubes, you can have a better burn. The burn point in the FEMA version, as well, is at the bottom of the tube, rather than the top. What you want is for the biomass to self-feed into the fire, rather than for the fire to simply burn randomly.

Having the fire right about at the constrictor plate makes for the hottest burn, letting the ash fall through the grate, while gravity feeds the biomass down to continue the burn at it's most efficient point. The J-tubes used in this particular instructable also help to keep the burn at or near it's most efficient location. If you were to use this model to provide fuel for an engine, you would have the option of stopping the engine after awhile to add more fuel, without significantly damaging the burn - you could simply close it back up, and start the engine again.

The suction from the carburetor would keep fresh air flowing into the gasifier. There are also a lot of really neat gasifier projects that people have put up on YouTube. Some run lawnmowers, some run pickup trucks. I've even seen a small one that runs a motorcycle. I think a simple water bubbler takes out a lot of tars. The question is, what to do with the stinky, dirty water then. As I understand it, water is definitely helpful at removing tars from the air via a bubbler system.

However, doing so would mean putting a lot of water vapor into the system by Make A Deck Out Of Wood Pallets Guitar way of evaporation. The hottest point in the combustion process in the gasifier should take care of cracking that's actually the technical term! If it's not hot enough, then perhaps a narrower restriction plate might help.

Also, simple air filters old-fashioned hay or dry pine needles work well will also absorb a lot of the tars while letting the combustibles flow through. It would be fairly inefficient to use this to run a steam engine on - it's main purpose is to produce flammable gasses that are clean enough to run a vehicle's internal combustion engine with.

While you could use the simple burner on the end of the pipe to provide heat for the boiler on a steam engine, you'd also have to provide air flow via air pressure or an in-line blower motor to keep the air moving through the system. It's actually more efficient for steam engines, at least! One offshoot of gasifiers is called a "rocket stove. So, dumb question here. What keeps that rubber cap on top of the hopper from bursting into flames?

Isn't there a blazing inferno just a couple feet under it? Very intriguing and simple design. First "doable" one I've seen so far. If you welded the pipe fittings and other points than it could get pretty much as hot as you wanted although I see you dont have access to a welder.

You can usually find a fabricator shop that will weld it for free or at a low price. Wood gasifiers are confusing to me but I was looking at your design and was wondering if you could put a valve where the rubber piece is to allow easier access? And just to make sure that where you put your fuel right? Hi there!

This is by far the best gasifier design I have seen for home use! I too have had a journey creating them, and I love how you have mixed so many designs into yours! It is definitely open for more modification, I would like to suggest some further ideas: I am now on my way to attempting methanol creation from bio-gas which requires a fluid bed reactor, and from what I know now, these can be made and simplified just as easy as we can do with these wood gas burners.

Once the gas leaves the unit, you can further purify it by using: - Filters: several can be placed along the gas process. I know of cyclone, water, fluid bed and fiberglass. Peltier or Stirling modules for energy production off the burner. Download a. Hope any of this helps. As you can guess, I stay clear of the smoke these days :. You have written a very informative and well written i9nstructable. You have touched every detail and told of the consequences of doing that operation some other way.

Excellent reading. Very easy to follow. Like all the rest of of the things you have built over the years on your website. I have followed your work for a long time. Would like to ask a question. Many years ago about the gas shortage of I was readung up on the wood gasifiers. Some knowledgeable person was explaining the different wood types used as fuels.

I was thinking that a hardwood that gave off a lot of heat and little smoke would be the best. According to this fellow, the best fuels were the ones that produced a lot of smoke. I am sure you have studied the wood types. What are your suggestions? Thanks again for your great work. By mdavis19 Follow. More by the author:. It prevents material from just falling out of the bottom of the tube. It also holds hot char exiting the bottom of the reaction tube.

Gases exiting the bottom of the reaction tube have to pass through this layer of hot charcoal and get reduced. Shaking the grate periodically allows fine char and ash to sift out through the holes in the grate. By the time char makes it to the edge of the grate it is too cool to further reduce the gases, so it can be ejected by shaking to make room for fresh, hot char. Here I have installed the shaker grate. I made it by cutting the bottom out of a stainless steel colander I bought cheap at a yard sale.

The colander already had a lot of holes in it, but I drilled quite a few more in it as well. If you are advised to stay indoors, take steps to keep indoor air as clean as possible.

Keep your windows and doors closed - unless it's extremely hot outside. Run your air conditioner, if you have one. Keep the filter clean to prevent bringing additional smoke inside. Open windows to air out the house when air quality improves.

Note: If you don't have an air conditioner, staying inside with the windows closed may be dangerous in extremely hot weather. In these cases, seek alternative shelter, such as with relatives or a cleaner air shelter. Help keep particle levels inside lower. When smoke is heavy for a prolonged period of time, fine particles can build up indoors even though you may not be able to see them. Try to avoid using anything that burns, such as wood fireplaces, gas logs, gas stoves - and even candles.

Don't vacuum. That stirs up particles already inside your home. And don't smoke. That puts even more pollution in your lungs, and in the lungs of people around you. Have at least a five-day supply of medication on hand. Call your healthcare provider if your symptoms worsen. If you think you are having a heart attack or stroke, dial Get air quality information: If there is an active fire in your area, follow your local news, the airnow. Only your doctor can advise you about your specific health situation.

For information about home air cleaners: Guide to Air Cleaners in the Home. Contact Us to ask a question, provide feedback, or report a problem. Jump to main content. An official website of the United States government. Contact Us. How Smoke from Fires Can Affect Your Health Smoke is made up of a complex mixture of gases and fine particles produced when wood and other organic materials burn.

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