How To Make Wood Gas Biofuel (and an experimental gas collection method)

hello everyone in my previous video about making Senko Hanavi fireworks I briefly showed my process that I used to make charcoal and if you watch that video you may have noticed in the clips of that charcoal making process that the smoke coming off of my charcoal can is extremely flammable this is known as wood gas and it's composed of a variety of many organic compounds from butane to methane and even some elemental hydrogen this is of course extremely flammable and so it can be used to fuel many sorts of different things even engines in this video I will be showing a simple process to make wood gas and then later in the video I might show an experimental method I've been thinking about to collect this wood gas so it can be put to good use wood gas is produced when any organic material not necessarily just wood is heated but not allowed enough oxygen to catch on fire the heat causes the chemical bonds that are in the organic material to break so that you end up with methane and hydrogen and all of these volatile compounds escaping as gas for my organic material I have just chosen these small sticks and I just need to figure out how to heat these without the presence of oxygen so what I will do is enclose them in a small metal container in this case a small paint can I want to pack my container as full as possible so that there's plenty of material in there to make a lot of gas here's the stove I'll be using to heat my smaller can and I've shown this stove in a number of videos now it's very simple it's just a paint can with a soup can shove to the side so that fuel can be fed through well the fires still burning and I have a couple of metal bars that go across the bottom just so this can has something to rest on I have this stove loaded with wood maybe a little too loaded but it'll burn down quickly and my smaller can goes right in the center now to cap this smaller can I just have of course the lid that came with the paint can but I have a metal brake line that actually extends through lid and then comes out and I bent it on a right angle so that this is where the wood gas will be ejected from and positive pressure inside the can from the gas being produced should prevent oxygen from re-entering all right I am ready to fire this up and make some wood gas this really says I can hardly see through the gas that's being produced at this point this started very fast now much of this that's coming off at the very start of this process is steam as water in the wood is being boiled off but it's probably still flammable at this point just barely this fire has only been going for maybe two or three minutes but I've been struggling to move the camera around where you're gonna be able to see me without the smoke blocking my way but look at how fast this wood gas is being produced at this point as the flames catch it it catches it on fire so if we actually wanted to collect this we would have to move the outlet of this pipe further away from the fire itself or the fire would just burn it away there have actually been commercially made vehicles mostly produced during World War two that ran on wood gas when other fuels were scarce so it is a very viable fuel source you can see just how much potential fuel is there and this is actually quite weak if I got this fire hotter it would be producing even faster as this gas is being produced there's also quite a lot of tar that is coming out of this pipe which is why I have this pan down here to collect it this tar is a useful product but at the same time it would completely destroy any engine or other mechanical thing we tried to fuel on this gas if it actually got into the engine so what needs to be done to the gas in order to use it for such purposes is you need to process it first or at least collect it and let it settle for a while so that all the smoke particles in this tar can come out well it's been about 15 minutes since I first put my can on the fire and finally would gas production has stopped which tells me that I have reduced all of the sticks in my small can to charcoal which is a very useful by-product itself it can be used for cooking without smoke of course you know that if you have a charcoal barbecue so now that I've shown you the basics of how wood gas can be made let's try a method to collect it this is something that I thought of myself and it is by no means the best method out there I'm not even going to say it's a good method in fact I haven't even tried it yet so we'll see what happens okay so I am reloaded and my cans are ready to burn again to produce more wood gas and this is my collection system I'm using water because as the gas flows into the water it should self filter all of the liquids that are in the gas should condense as well as all the smoke particles they should just settle out and fall right into the tank of water this small container which is sitting at the surface of my fish tank is the actual vessel that will collect the gas so I'll be able to fit about a gallon of gas in here before it's full now the first thing I need to do is evacuate this container of all the air that is currently inside and to do that I have mounted a valve at the top and I will just open this valve and then I will suck the air out and the valve is closed again all right I'm a little short on water in the tank now because it's all been pulled into this top tank so I will just refill this a little bit so now most of the air is out of this container and that should allow me to get a fairly pure result when I fill this container with wood gas with this container all set and ready to go now I just need to connect my wood gasifier to it and to do that I have this longer section of brake line that I have I've cut a small hole in the bottom of this container that the end of this can fit under so that the end feeds inside and the other end has a small coupler that can connect to the opening off of my small can as you can see this is filling very quickly we are producing a ton of wood guess I just ignited the fire maybe 30 seconds ago so this is going to create a lot more wood guest than will fit in this container if you actually wanted to collect all of it it would take a much bigger container set up in the same configuration but as I said this is probably not the very best method to get this job done it's just a fun one I thought it would be interesting to watch well I filled this little container very quickly in fact I think I probably could have done that a dozen times over so definitely by volume this is not an effective method of collecting a lot of wood gas because obviously I'm still producing gas here and yeah I have no means to collect it now that my container is full you can already start to see how the smoke is starting to settle out of my wood gas here it's just slowly falling toward the bottom of this container and settling in the water soon I should have a very pure result on top and then it will be time to test it so now I want to try to burn this but first I'd like to slightly pressurize it so that I can make it come out of this valve to do that I'm going to sink the container I'm going to weigh it down in the water so that the water is trying to push the gas upwards and that should give me some pressure to be able to eject it out of this valve and that could actually be used to fill other containers as well okay this is the platform I had it sitting on so now if I'm very careful and I'm gonna spill a lot of water doing this I can sink this container by placing weight on top all right and success I got it weighed down no surprise to many of you I'm sure that weighing down a blank container in a fish tank is not especially easy but I got it done I capped off my valve with a cap and drilled a tiny hole in it so that there's just a small little vent for the gas to escape out of so I guess we can just give this a test first I'll open this valve slightly and you should be able to hear and you can see the water spraying out I can smell the wood gas so let's light it it's definitely flammable but I think it's mostly methane methane burns very very clear and so it won't be especially visible to the camera well there we go if I get a little bit of a little bit of the butane from the lighter in there you'll be able to see the flame one advantage of gasses that burn so clear is that that usually means that they're burning very clean they're not producing much soot which soot is usually unburned carbon which burns very yellow so being as clean burning as it is that means that you can get a very efficient combustion process if you were to run an engine off of this gas I'm gonna try one more thing I'm just gonna take the cap off of this and we'll see how it burns when it's coming out of a wider opening this may use the last of my gas really quickly so I'm probably only gonna have one or two shots at this well that works quite well I can try that one more time yeah not too bad I think that's a pretty good result oh and there's the last my gasps all out all right that's it all right everyone well I hope you enjoyed this video I know I can ramble sometimes during these longer unscripted videos so I hope you enjoyed it anyway if you really enjoyed it please consider supporting my channel on patreon I would love to have more support on patreon so that I could continue making these videos without having to rely on sponsors for funding also leave me some comments below I still read all of my comments and I'd love to hear your feedback so thank you for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 1,615,599

Rating: 4.9105697 out of 5

Keywords: How To, Wood Gas, Biofuel, Alternative Fuel, Fuel, Energy, Alternative Energy, NightHawkInLight, Survival, Outdoors

Id: Cm46KAPLZpQ

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Im_Not_Antagonistic]

Wood gas is so hot right now.

[u/AdmiralTypeZeo]

Do you guys know that woodgas can be used in normal gasoline cars? Just check youtube for woodgas pickups. Im thinking of woodgas or vegoil pickup in the future for entertainment and prepping.

[u/meoka2368]

So if you wanted to run straight without having to collect first, you'd run it through a bong.