Any body ever thought of using there chips in a wood chip boiler/generator

[mckenzie355]

I have had a thought for some time now of turning my chips into electricity. Anybody had the same thought ?

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[Marshy]

Yes, lots of info out there. Most all 4 stroke combustion engines can be ran on fumes from gasification. People have converted cars to run completely on gasification so it would be simple enough to convert a generator engine...

 

[Marshy]

It's a very complicated process requiring a very high lever of technical expertise and is not practical on a small scale, yet.

Not true at all IMO. Sure it'll take some research and trial and error but you don't need a PHD or masters in engineering to make it work.

 

[DR. P. Proteus]

It's a very complicated process requiring a very high lever of technical expertise and is not practical on a small scale, yet.

Dude, like there are hillbillies is old Toyotas driving the interstates as we speak on that ****... well, yeah, they are driving on the shoulder but they are still driving.

 

[DR. P. Proteus]

Got any examples?

I'd love to see videos or read about them.

Yes, all over youtube. Maybe its trick photography, I don't know.

 

[DR. P. Proteus]

Anyway:

There are electric companies that use chips to fire the boilers.

Sad to say most of our chips go into black dyed mulch.

As far as making a vehicle run on them? Well its just like anything else a man has done.

 

[DR. P. Proteus]

Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture generated electricity using pig manure methane 40 years ago.

It's a little different designing a system that generates electricity that doesn't need the constant babysitting that a driving a car with a wood powered engine involves. Do you want to sit at your electric generator like you do behind the wheel of a car 24/7/365?

Its pain in the ass to keep a vehicle running on wood I can imagine. Its a pain in the ass the other way too.

 

[DR. P. Proteus]

I have had a thought for some time now of turning my chips into electricity. Anybody had the same thought ?

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If you do some leg work you might be able to put something together where you sell chips to a power company. The chips have to be "right" and you need a lot of them.

Running your own home power on them would be a lot of work and smoke.

But no harder than working for a living I would hazard a guess.

 

[Marshy]

Got any examples?

I'd love to see videos or read about them.

Here, the guy even explains how to build the system! Part 1 of like 20...

 

[Marshy]

I know. It's been done for decades.

It's got little to do with home electric generation though.

You missed the whole point of my first comment then. Any 4 stroke engine can be converted to run from a wood gasifier. Buy a generator and build a gasifier to suit it's fuel demand to make electricity. That would be way way easier than making a scaled down steam plant with a steam turbine.

 

[qweesdraw]

If you have the time to waste-DO IT.
Put them in a cereal box and burn them,fill holes on the wood lot.
Use them to burn for your stove to keep warm on light chills.
How much power do you think you can make for the time involved?
If doing a car or truck you will have to wait to get a fire going farm only!
Doing anything newer with a computer almost impossible.(you need a carb to do this)
Armageddon isn't here yet keep the plans and supply's to build it.
Just a few thing to think about.

 

[blades]

Here ya go complete systems " STAK Properties" enter that in your search engine. Fed. printing office has a whole booklet on gasification circa 1940ish. There are vehicles running on wood gas as we speak both here and in Europe. Course this is all home built stuff. Last external combustion commercially produced vehicle I can think of right now were the Stanley Steamers ( steam engine for the unknowing). With something like this being experimental it does not come under the thumb of the EPA.

 

[mckenzie355]

Ai actually sat down couple of winters ago and drew out the designs, which involved down draft , post steam recovery to preheat chips and induction system utilizing o2 sensors.
My biggest obstacle was the turbine. These are expensive and you would want the most efficient one. As far as baby sitting the project, I was thinking of semi retirement project

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[Marshy]

Ai actually sat down couple of winters ago and drew out the designs, which involved down draft , post steam recovery to preheat chips and induction system utilizing o2 sensors.
My biggest obstacle was the turbine. These are expensive and you would want the most efficient one. As far as baby sitting the project, I was thinking of semi retirement project

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It's hard to tell from what little info you provided but I don't think we are talking apples to apples. A gasifier system alone doesn't have a steam turbine. Were you using the gasifier to provide heat to make steam and in return spin a turbine generator? Steam turbines are sensitive and costly equipment. Not exactly good system for a home owner to try and design. Even with an engineering degree steam systems can be dangerous if not designed properly. Best bang for the buck IMO is coupling the gasifier to an internal combustion engine that will use the gasifier as the fuel source, just like the truck in the video. Having a chip preheating system is a good idea and heat could be reclaimed from the engines exhaust. I came real close to building on as a project in my engineering studies. We were going to build one to power a small go-cart...

 

[mckenzie355]

I did actually find a production model of a boiler that utilized multi fuel setup logs,chips,coal,oil. It had a computer assisted regulator to control burn rates.
As far as turbine goes , yes I agree very intricate, steam engine not so. They have been using steam engines for a long time now, just hard to find one, but with the technology of today, it shouldn't be that impossible

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[mckenzie355]

It's hard to tell from what little info you provided but I don't think we are talking apples to apples. A gasifier system alone doesn't have a steam turbine. Were you using the gasifier to provide heat to make steam and in return spin a turbine generator? Steam turbines are sensitive and costly equipment. Not exactly good system for a home owner to try and design. Even with an engineering degree steam systems can be dangerous if not designed properly. Best bang for the buck IMO is coupling the gasifier to an internal combustion engine that will use the gasifier as the fuel source, just like the truck in the video. Having a chip preheating system is a good idea and heat could be reclaimed from the engines exhaust. I came real close to building on as a project in my engineering studies. We were going to build one to power a small go-cart...

What about this idea? If you used captured steam and wrapped the silo, and used it to condense and heat chips, which in turn acted as air intake ?

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[Cerran]

Not true at all IMO. Sure it'll take some research and trial and error but you don't need a PHD or masters in engineering to make it work.

If that were the case it would be commercial scale, the reality however is quite different. Wood gas has a lot of long chain hydrocarbons that don't burn well in IC engines and requires additional treatment if you are going to make the engine a reliable operation.

 

[zogger]

If that were the case it would be commercial scale, the reality however is quite different. Wood gas has a lot of long chain hydrocarbons that don't burn well in IC engines and requires additional treatment if you are going to make the engine a reliable operation.

Doing a methane digester makes better/cleaner fuel, use like a propane carb adapter. Now getting it into a tank for big amounts, not sure. The small scale ones I have seen pics of used big tractor innertubes for storage and pressure. wouldn't last long in a genny engine, OK for a cooking ring though. I made a cobjob test one once, the gas was quite flammable, I just wooshed it off in plastic bags.

With that said, the woodgas will work "good enough" and easy enough to scrounge wood and store wood.

 

[Cerran]

Doing a methane digester makes better/cleaner fuel, use like a propane carb adapter. Now getting it into a tank for big amounts, not sure. The small scale ones I have seen pics of used big tractor innertubes for storage and pressure. wouldn't last long in a genny engine, OK for a cooking ring though. I made a cobjob test one once, the gas was quite flammable, I just wooshed it off in plastic bags.

With that said, the woodgas will work "good enough" and easy enough to scrounge wood and store wood.

Wood gas is fine if you want to play around with it and see what can be done at a small scale, but it's not even realistic (When I say realistic I mean commercially viable) on a large scale yet. Most wood gasifiers put out gas on the scale of 90-140 Btu/scf while natural gas is about 1000 Btu/scf so vastly different energy values.

Digester gas is better but digesters are not uncomplicated and optimizing them for the best gas production requires some very specific know-how and skill (I work on larger digesters fairly often). The reality is that most of these technologies sound good on paper, but the complexity precludes their use at a small scale with current technology.

 

[lapeer20m]

I agree. While it's a fun idea and would be neat to experiment with, it's not a practical way to generate electricity if grid power is available. Electricity is a very good value for the dollar.

I did some research, and grid tied solar is finally less expensive in michigan than electricity from the grid. Detroit Edison offers 20 cents rebate per installed watt of solar, the feds give a 30% tax rebate and a 4% 10 year loan on solar. Works out that i can purchase a complete solar kit that is rated to produce twice the power my home currently consumes for under $50/month.

I think there is value in experimenting with other means of generating electricity, but solar is finally cheap enough to be economically viable.

One problem with generating electricity with wood gas is the extremely tight rpm tolerance required to generate clean power. It is recommended that you be within 2-3% of 60 hz. That means that the engine needs to be regulated to within about 100 rpm's regardless of load. This is tricky for a small engine even with common fuels like gasoline or natural gas. I would imagine that it's even more difficult of a challenge using woodgas. This doesn't make the project not worth doing, it's just something to think about. Possible solutions to unsteady RPM: You could only power appliances that are not picky about frequency, like toasters, electric heaters, incandescent light bulbs, etc. You could alternatively get extra fancy and power an inverter type generator with woodgas, like a honda eu2000 (or a chinease clone) These "generators" are actually an extremely efficient alternator and and inverter that make perfectly clean 60hz power regardless of rpm as long as you stay within a really wide margin, like between 1,000-5000 rpm. Another cheaper but less efficient option is to turn one or more automotive type alternators that feed a battery bank that in turn powers a cheap inverter. You can get a 2kw inverter for $200 shipped to your house. An alternator makes a nominal 12 volts between about 800 and 8000 rpm's, but more current (amps) are available at higher rpm. Automotive alternators are very inefficient at generating electricity but that's the penalty you pay for a device that produces clean stable power over a wide range of rpm's. One more option is to find an inexpensive used UPS that corrects both frequency and voltage. These are not very common, but they do exist and resale value is very poor, making them inexpensive. You could then use the original generator outside of it's standard operating rpm and the UPS would produce the correct frequency and voltage.

Ideally, if you were using woodgas to power a generator is that you could benefit from cogeneration and heat your home with the excess heat.