Running a Gasoline Engine on Firewood | Woodgas Biofuel

this video was sponsored by Squarespace if you need a website domain or online store make it with Squarespace hi again everyone in this video I'll be tackling one of the end goals of my woodgas series which is to attempt to run a gasoline engine on wood gas this is one of the primary benefits of wood gas as a biofuel is that it's easily adaptable to preexisting technologies like gasoline engines in this way we can run vehicles and generators all sorts of things that already exist using a fuel that we can make ourselves so what I've done for this video is I've gone to a local bike shop a purchase they used bicycle and I've installed on this bicycle a four-stroke engine kit now these are kits that are commonly available online you can find them on eBay for about $200 and I'll put a link in the video description below if you'd like to purchase one yourself it is important that I'm using a four-stroke engine because the more common two-stroke engines require oil to be mixed with the fuel and since the fuel is going to be a gas it'd be pretty difficult to mix a oil in with that so the engine would quickly overheat and burn out with a four-stroke engine it has its own oil we don't have to worry about any lubrication provided by the fuel as a bonus four-stroke engines are a little more efficient than two-stroke so we should get a little better fuel economy out of this build now this engine kit came with a gasoline fuel tank which would usually be mounted to the front of the bicycle frame right about in here you can see I obviously don't have that installed on this bicycle because I only want to run it on wood gas in fact gasoline has never been used to run this engine so what I've done instead of adding the fuel tank is of course add my gasifier setup and that is what you're looking at here on the back of the bicycle this container here is the gasifier this is where all of the gasification occurs this second container is just a filter to help filter out and condense all the tar and the water vapor and all the other particulate that is in the wood gas from the gasification process so that it is only pure wood gas by the time it passes through this tubing and reaches the engine that's the dream anyway in reality you're gonna have some smoke but hopefully it's much more minimal than it would have been before it passed through the filter so let's take a closer look at this gasifier because this is a much different design than the gasifiers I've shown how to build in my previous videos on this subject this gasifier is built from a bee smoker which is a tool I'm very familiar with from when I was much younger I used to raise bees until I became quite allergic this tool allows you to inject smoke into their hive so they think the hive is on fire they eat a whole bunch of honey and then they get fat and lazy so that you can sneak in and steal the rest it wasn't until recently that I realized a bee smoker is actually a gasifier that is pre built and you can buy it off the shelf the way that this works is you load it up with fuel in this case I'll just use some wood shavings and then we light these shavings on fire and I'll show you the result so now you can see how the smoke is produced as I blow the bellows on the bee smoker now check this out that's pretty good wood gas production in it so the way that this works is when the smoker is completely filled with fuel there's really only enough air injected through the air inlet at the bottom for a small portion of that fuel to burn that small portion that ignites is enough to heat the remaining portion of the fuel inside this container to its ignition point but without enough oxygen that fuel can't ignite itself and so it's ejected out of the top as wood gas now you might wonder why I didn't use this method in my previous videos because this is a very efficient method of creating wood gas the problem is it's mixed with the products of the complete combustion that occur in the bottom portion of this container and so it is up to 50% in their co2 if I was storing this gas that would be a problem because it would take about twice as much volume to store the same quantity of flammable gas but since we're burning the wood gas directly in this setup where it's running directly to an engine economy of storage and the volume of the gas doesn't really matter we just need a flammable product that will burn well in the engine I only had to make one real modification to the B smoker in my final design to make it compatible and that was to plug the normal outlet hole and drill a new hole in the side for my little piece of plumbing pipe here to lead into the filter now for the filter media you can see in here I'm using cedar shavings I found these work ok they're not the best thing in the world you definitely get a lot of smoke still coming through the filter but it at least takes out most of the tar and water vapor the final step in a wood gas system is to get it to mix properly with air before it's injected into the carburetor of the engine and for this I have a two-way valve setup so the wood gas comes in through this line goes into this valve and then I have another intake here which is where the air will come in now I can adjust the amount of air that mixes with the wood gas by closing or opening this valve and this allows me to get the proper fuel air mixture for the engine to run if you watched my earlier video about wood gas and the proper fuel air mixture for combustion you know it's about a 50/50 ratio before it becomes combustible so that's what I'll be shooting for with this setup all right well it is the moment of truth I've been working on this project for a number of weeks now making various revisions to this setup to get good wood gas production and get the engine to run but up till now I've only run the engine one time successfully on wood gas and only for a few seconds so you'll basically be watching only the second time that I've ever tried to fire up this engine now for my fuel source I am NOT using cedar shavings like I showed in the initial testing of the bee smoker because although they do produce a lot of wood gas they also burn out very quickly so I'm using a little bit more substantial fuel in these bits and pieces of a 2x4 I'm using commercially bought lumber because I know it's going to be consistent and that will eliminate a variable that naturally source fuel would give me while I'm trying to diagnose any issues in this system all right so my gasifier is loaded with fuel so all that's left to do is light it up stoke the flames until I'm getting good gas production and then try to fire up the engine see what happens from there okay I think this is pretty good wood gas production you have to leave the lid off of the gasifier well you get it started so that the fire can really get going okay you should be able to see on the other camera here how the wood gas which still obviously contains a lot of smoke is now coming through the top valve now a trick I learned from the YouTube channel mr. Tesla Mian is if you close the air inlet valve on the engine and then pull the engine a couple times it helps to pull the wood gas through the system before you actually go to start it okay now I can open the intake back up and we should be able to get this engine started no all right let's see try that again all right I got it to turn over a couple times but not good enough okay if the engine doesn't start right away you got to restock the gasifier because without the engine pulling air through the system the gasifier is gonna lose lose temperature pretty quickly all right I think that's enough enough gasification again test it out by lighting it on fire oh yeah that should be good all right close it up again Hey oh come on huh I started it I started it it idles for a second there okay that's a real good sign anyway now one issue with this is that this gasifier is definitely very under sized to run an engine like this it should probably be about four or five times as large to run the engine for any long duration but I figured the beef smoker was a good place to start it was a good place to actually test this project and maybe now that I know that it can idle the engine I can switch it out for another design that might last longer well this is definitely still a work in progress but I was happy to get the engine at least running at idle again that's telling me that I am producing clean enough wood gas to actually run the engine which wasn't major concern when I saw how much smoke remained once the wood gas reached to the intake so hopefully I can come up with a better method of filtration than the cedar shavings I think another issue that I'm having is with my little dual ball valve setup on the intake of this engine I don't think that it's allowing enough air into the engine and that's causing it to die when I try to go past idle I'll try maybe replacing that dual ball valve setup so that we can get a little more airflow maybe even replace the gasifier not because I'm not making enough wood guess but because I'd like to make it for longer a larger gasifier will help with that if you have any ideas on how to improve this system that I have not thought of please leave them in the comments below hopefully together we can come up with something that will be viable as a means of transportation I'd love to be able to take this down to the corner store running on nothing but firewood as fuel this video was sponsored by Squarespace who has been working with me to support my projects over this past summer Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building and hosting websites that makes it really easy to jump right in and make a professional looking site without any technical experience you can start building a website today with a free trial and their wide selection of templates give you an easy way to jump right in and make something that looks great you never have to worry about any back-end maintenance or software updates with Squarespace because they handle all of that for you all you have to think about is what sort of content you want on your website use the free trial at squarespace.com to see how easy it is to start building a website and when you're ready to launch come back and use my link Squarespace comm forward slash nighthawk for 10% off your first web site or domain thank you for watching this video please leave me comments below ideas for future videos I'd love to hear from you thanks for watching

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 706,144

Keywords: Wood Gas, Gasifier, Gassifier, Biofuel, Green Energy, Green, Energy, Solar, Battery, Generator, Off Grid, NightHawkInLight, Free Fuel, Gasificador, Gas de madera

Id: 522BaxM0Jnk

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018