How To Make Wood Gas Biofuel (and an experimental gas collection method)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ส.ค. 2017
- In my previous video I showed how I make my charcoal for use in fireworks. A byproduct of my charcoal making process is wood gas, a mixture of many flammable gasses that can be used as fuel. Wood gas is simple to make, but requires some careful thought to collect and process to remove tar and other contaminants. My collection method could use some work, but I did end up with a reasonable quantity of purified gas by the end.
Thanks to my Patreon supporters who have helped to keep this channel going! A special thanks to my top supporters: Syniurge, Matthew Leitzke, & TheBackyardScientist
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Thanks for watching!
My grandfather bought a car dealership and garage 6 days before WW2 hit and he didn't sell a car for 6 years. He survived by selling parts and making wood gas generators that were attached to the front of cars. They were huge units about the size of washing machines but worked a treat as gas/ petrol was in short supply. He used to pump what little fuel there was out of the bowser by hooking up a bicycle to the pump and running a belt and pulley to it. My dad as a kid was the one who did most of the peddling. I still occasionally look at the photos and wonder in amazement how innovative they were back then.
I’m kind of obsessed with survival and starting from “The Basics” in terms of survival and working up in terms of technology. This, is incredibly interesting and useful.
It is and it will also help you bridge that knowledge into other industries, because they evolved from scratch. Alot of developing countries such as India are looking into this technology.
I've been interested in this type of fuel production for emergency purposes since I saw Mr Tesalonian do a video where he condensed the woodgas into a liquid form that could possibly be used in ICEs in place of normal gasoline or diesel. Can't find many instances of people doing that on a small scale like people do with the FEMA type gasifiers running generators, but enough evidence that it can be done.
I'm going to be taking place in starting a commune in the future where we'll be doing exactly that. I recommend watching Dr. Stone, the anime. It gives a lot of insight into.. a lot!
same hahah. I want to build my tools too
@@supersophisticated9943 cultist weebs, got it
One method of charcoal production we used to use here was a 44 gallon drum on it's side on a short stand with a pipe for the wood gas that would feed back and under the drum and into the small fire beneath it. Little camp fire would heat the drum packed with wood, and the gas would then be burned off to continue the process. This would produce large quantities of charcoal which we would then use in a furnace for metal working.
I thought this would be a complicated thing, requiring some special equipment. I was wonderfully surprised to see you using nothing more than cans, jars, and pipes to extract the gas and compress it too. Awesome!
Very glad you did this experiment Ben. My unpublished results are exactly the same. I've been wondering if the cleaned gas could be compressed, and used as viable source to fuel a mini foundry when propane isn't available. Also would be great to distill the smoke and let it settle into layers. I hear you can extract acetone and methyl alcohol. Definitely faster (and nicer) than working with manure.
The King of Random Maybe wait for the gases to settle down and then compress it in a gas tank? I don't know if you can do that as the wood gas is being produced though, it would definitely be interesting to see if one of you could achieve this
Hi grant
The King of Random I watch both of you guys and it would be cool to have an actual engine or a foundry like you said work on it. I am wondering if it is a viable cleaner gas than most that cars run on, also by the way ben was making it it looked like you could get tons of it from charcoal company's if they make their own charcoal the same way.
The King of Random you suck grant
Ahhhhhh king of random!!!!
Back in the day, I saw a version of this that used several tractor tire inner tubes as the collection vessels - which were easy to pressurize by placing a weighted platform over them.
I have watched several of these now. How is this guy so likable? Great videos.
Subtle confidence, knowledgeable & conveys that information in a very pedagogical way
Nice white guy with no rapey vibe
Cuz u gey
o.o its the bird yup XD
Are you kidding me within 3 seconds into the video I wanted to give him a noogie and give him a wedgie.... im sure it has been done many times before
I'm impressed by how high quality your results were with such a simple process. You managed to distill quite a pure byproduct from something that's essentially renewable. All using methods so basic a high school student could replicate them. I think this kind of work is valuable.
Need to make a nozzle with venturi oxygen mixing in like on a torch or bunsen burner etc... your gas rushing by pulls air in the holes at the base, they mix in the nozzle and with that might be able to make a flame that sustains itself
Zeff I was going to suggest this also.
Like in Oxy-Acetylen.
two years later he could use a pumper torch
Ah! Is that why the gas isn't staying lit -- too rich?
@@timmccormack3930 yeah without introducing turbulence in some way or another the gases cool before they mix and combust
I suspect that the parrot is the one giving you ideas! ;-)
Hello
@@birdpump Hello have a good day 😊
4:00 To remove the steam, a long spiral descending coil in the form of a cone, even with ice resting in the conical coil, would condense the steam to liquid to drip out the bottom(like a classical still), leaving much of the volatiles to burn. (some might also condense like tars and creosote, would need to control the final gas temperature to prevent this)
This is really cool. For more efficient collection and pressurization of the gas, you could use something taller like a water barrel, and fix your collection chamber at the bottom of it at the start
Just a quick shout out: You're awesome. Thanks for the great vids and good content. It's refreshing to see passionate TH-camrs out there educating other folks on the how's and what's of the natural world. Definitely going to be putting your education to good use! Thank you.
As far as I know from my grandpa when they had wood gas to run their cars after WWII here in Germany, the big advantage is you don´t need to store woodgas at high pressure.
After you cleaned the gas from tar with some water cooling and a sawdust filter, you can blow and collect it inside a balloon. Even the balloon will give you enough pressure to make it usable to run an engine. Just make sure it´s a vacuum system with no oxygen coming in.
Sounds like a plan
I was watching some kinda 'garage wars' show where they were tasked to improve the fuel efficientcy of some grain farm or some shit. Basically rising fuel prices to run dryers was making drying the grain too expensive with commercial fuels. One of their ideas to capture wood gas was to fill a large half tank with water then sink a slightly narrower half-tank in that. Then using a pipes to carry the smoke exaust down through between the tanks to be captured by the 'floating' half-tank. As more gas was collected it raised the floating tank out of the water. This stored quite a bit of gas. and the weight of the steel half-tank pressurizes it. So when the top tank is vented, gas can be forced out.
Probably just a mishap: Vacuum means less pressure than the atmosphere so air is sucked into the system. You need overpressure or just good seals to keep the air out.
I have a Solo stove (portable backpacking stove) that"s configuration is set up to burn the wood gas coming out of the stove. I didn't know the working theory of charcoal or wood gas but watching your video enlightened me as to what's going on. There are thousands of processes and chemical reactions around us that we see but don't understand, think about or appreciate what's actually happening right there in front of us. Nice work.
The Quality of life in this clip is off the charts
Thanks for the video, probably the easiest explanation of wood gas i've seen. The transparent collection containers was helpful, I had to go back in the video to make sure the fish tank was actually clear at the beginning of the process.
Came from Codyslab recommending one of your videos and I'm hooked. You thoroughly explain everything, have very clever designs and ideas and your editing is fantastic. The best part is your huge grin when you see something working the way you wanted it to 😂 You are one cool ass dude and it's nice to see innovative people like you because this world seems to be losing people like you, Cody, and other TH-camrs alike because we rely so heavily on corporations and gov't to do the work for us while we are the ones that get screwed in the end for letting them do so.
I LUV u'r ' Go 4 it ' attitude. It's the BEST WAY to educate oneself. God Bless U young man. ALOHA.
Thank you! What an amazing video! I never knew that heating an organic material such as wood in the absence of oxygen would cause the chemical bonds in the solids to break down and form gasses. This is absolutely fascinating!
"Experimental Collection Method"
Makes a Gravity Bong
This comment made a significant amount of air come out of my nose
@@NavJordaan same
As usual I, and I am sure I could say, "we" are not disappointed. I have known about this process and that it was used during WWII but I have often wondered how they may have filtered the smoke and tar from the newly recovered wood gas. This was a great way to do in my opinion. I have had the opportunity to talk with a few people who had experience with this during that time period and one of those was a dear uncle. He said he watched the Germans do this and one of the things they did was to use the freshly made charcoal to heat the next round of wood chunks. One other rambling thought was that when you were 1st lighting your gas after weighting it with the rocks. I made a similar in water collector for a hydrogen generator. I had some success by putting the collection vessel in a ring that allowed it to go up and down but it couldn't tip over. I know that natural gas piped in our homes only has a few pounds of pressure so I placed a two lb. weight on top to give me equal pressure (don't know if my tube size and nozzle made a huge difference or not) for and even less poppy burn. It worked out well for HHO gas torch. I don't want to suggest anyone handle such HHO, just saying what I did was ok for myself and my situation. All gases have potentially dangerous characteristics.
Well now i understan! I have had a wak understaning about how to make the gass, but this short video gave me all the info i need! Thanks
Awesome! This is the clearest explanation of producing wood gas that I've seen so far.
You're such a happy dude
Very cool experiment! I actually have a friend that converted a Geo Tracker to run on wood gas and it works very well. Much better than I thought it would. Thanks again for sharing your method!
--Eric O.
That would be a very fun project. I've got some work to do before I have a system that runs clean enough for that
To my surprise it works very well. Good luck with it and look forward to seeing more!
How does he store the wood gas. I remember a while back there was a colony reality show where they just put the entire wood gas producing system right onto the truck and piped it right into the engine.
some use a small trailer, basicly they haul their own fuel source
Probably uses a lot of wood... which would create another problem that is already present... deforestation.
I have been trying to understand how it works. You just explained it in less than 12 minutes. Thank you sir.
the level of simplicity in the video is unmatched! thanks
Instructions unclear. I created a Level 3 Nuclear Biohazard.
My station is worse i accidentally create a nuclear bomb
Lol
Hey what if you had an afterburner oxygen depleted after burner to burn the tires s*** off first before you collected it would that not work I does work I've got it in my camper
lol
I'm sorry, not only have you failed to read the instructions properly, you have also failed to spell "unclear" consistently. You, in fact, do not have any nuclear hazard, you have an unclear hazard. Don't worry, the EPA is much more friendly than the FBI.
Great video, not sure if it was mentioned but, because you started harvesting gas right from the beginning of the burn, I believe you would have collected all the oxygen that was in the can with the sticks. If you look at the volume of the can vs the collector, there is probably 30% maybe? Which would have made quite a leaner mix of gas. I wonder if you did this again but started collecting after it had run for a bit, purging the can so the gas would have been more pure/ a richer mix of wood gas. The flame then should have burned constantly out of the tip
I just tried it, and it works surprisingly well! Thanks for informing me!
You sure are a smart guy. I happen to be a chemist, but I haven't done that many "life hacks" like making fuel from trash, or wood as you have. It's a fun method you used, with the fish tank. Thanks for the video.
Great video! The tank of water was sooo black after filling the vessel just once.
I love your bird! Also for an alternative collection method you could lead the gas into a small container in which the soot will be deposited, possibily full of water to scrub the gas, then have a nozzle coming out and fill balloons!
Your videos are always so easy to understand. Many thx!
Congratulations Ben ! You did a fantastic job ! Seeing videos like that just make my day , kudos to you 💪💪🤙
another great video!
yes it is :)
He looks like James Arthur doin' some Science and Engineering hahaha. Nice content man. Keep it up.
Ben:
Nice to see you involved in Music plus Science plus Survivalism! Greetings fro a South American, Brazil.
I myself am a prepper since 1.995. I like nature, trekking, antiques, craftsmanship, detectorism, art and so on.
See you!
I love your channel. This wood gas video is just a typical example of your top notch content. Biochar/activated charcoal might be a good parallel, but standalone video idea.
I made a gas collector out of a 5 gallon bucket and an giant upside down nalgene beaker. I had 4 half inch PVC tubes as guides. The PVC tubes we're spaced from the sides of the bucket in order to loosely allow the straight sided nalgene beaker to slide up and down in the bucket.
Drill a hole in the bottom (now the top) of the beaker, a couple of rubber washers, a bulkhead hose barb.
Fill the bucket with water, push the beaker down so that it is flush with the water, hook up the hose to gas source.
The beaker will rise as it fills with gas. Place a weight on top of the beaker to increase gas pressure.
It's good to see you doing a video on this! I've been interested in wood gas (also known as producer gas) for a while now, ever since I learned that it was used to power cars back during WWII. There was even a training tank converted to run off it! Minus the turret and most of the excess weight, of course. Unfortunately the problem with producer gas cars is that if everyone starts using them, it creates mass deforestation issues. On the other hand, if you have one yourself, all you need to drive cross-country is an axe and a saw.
I'd love to see all the scrap wood from mills and other places being used to produce wood gas. Maybe even wood from demolished buildings and such too? Who knows? There's certainly an untapped potential out there. Eventually we may need to start seriously considering it once other sources of fuel begin to dry up or become more expensive.
Yep
I always said the best inventions are made around the kitchen table and sooooo 2 speak a fish tank in the back yard has proven correctly, lol.
I loved your posts and you definitely explained things so even an old Marine like me can understand.
God bless you and thank you again..
i never knew tar can be produced this way .. very informative .. great video , great work
keep uploading such wonderful videos👍😄
You need an air mix extension, like propane torches have, a jet in the center and air is allowed to come in from the sides and mix with it prior to the point of ignition. It might work. Also you may have too much water vapor in it, try running it through a back of rock salt, or a box of salt to remove water.
Loved the vid, Thankyou so much,
I was thinking of a cooled serpentine to condense the steam from the gas so it arrives in the the collection chamber already separated.
Superb project.
Rob
I love your channel! You do things i like to do. This one is new for me.. im thinking in using it for cooking.. but obviously i need a pressurized container... keep spreading good knowledge.. some day we gona need it in real life.
Try pumping it out of the small container with your pvc vacuum pump then using the outlet of the pump to pressurize the wood gas into a separate, detachable container.
You might try using the nozzle from a propane torch so you get air mixing with the wood gas for better combustion. Good video!
You are a pretty smart guy with good ideas, Thank you. In gardening circles the charcoal is desired product referred to as bio char as a great soil supplement.
Oh! What a smart looking bird! What a joy to see that bird/mascot in every video. I envy you to have such a nice playfll friend... Good luck in your life endeavours!
GUYS ITS WILL WHEATON
YES!!!
as in night hawk light is Wesley crusher from star trek?
Nah, it's Will Wheaton's love child with Eric Bana.
you're right! Will's eyes, Eric's voice. But whose parrot? ;)
Haha, I thought the same thing when I started the video!
you are a great youtuber. I enjoy your work. Please keep it up!
a bigg thank you from sri lanka!!! your experiment is immensely valuable to us. we support your channel by all means brother....
As an artist, the first thing I thought about was using your charcoal for mark making. Awesome!
Some homes used to run on wood gas. Not the most efficient but it was a great use for the byproduct of charcoal that would other wise be wasted
Nice bong
Great video your idea for a water filter worked especially well, great ideas thanks for sharing.
a bird in a harness is the cutest thing ive seen all day !
Nice setup. If I could suggest a few improvements: 1. Have your container of gas at the bottom of the tank all the time, then you won't need to lower it. 2. The cap on the end made he pressure too high: I think that's why it burned better without the cap. It may burn better still if a little air is mixed with the gas before you put the lighter to it: like the mixer valve on a Bunsen burner. 3. Cool the gas before it goes into the container: put a wide section of pipe under water so that the tar condenses out. A wider pipe will take longer to get blocked with tar. These are genuine suggestions, I don't claim to be an expert and I don't have the resources to try myself, so offer these suggestions to you so that you may try them for me!
How to convert this to liquid state?
Jonathan Croley And he could have waited for the water vapor to cook off before he collected the gas
I can do it
Hook up a compressor
We used to call that a gravity bong.
Your method is really smart. It's a great filtering method. If you wanted to store the gas you would only need a pump to compress the gas and then direct the pump to a gas tank that withholds pressure.
This has given me a great idea for a secondary heat chamber on a wood stove. Now if I can figure out a way to get the tar it produces back in to the wood stove to use it as fuel for the fire as well. That way it doesn't collect in the gas chamber. Thanks!!
During the second world war many German vehicles like trucks and cars were equiped to produce and use woodgas as fuel. They were called Holzvergaser. This was due to the oil shortages at the time.
yes but they used the woodgas compressed and stored it in gas tanks
They even made some BMW motorcycles run on this princip - and not that bad and slow as well but most vehicles ran on gas that they didnt produce themselves but from mobile refinerie trucks with a stove and a steam powered compressor with a small wood fired steam engine - the engines generally burned and needed more motor oil
-bc of the hortage in oil the germans tried makeing synthetic oil from browncoal , stone coal, the black goo you collected from the wood gas and rapeseed oil they semi succeeded by makeing a additive to normal motor oil witch reduced crude oil needed for makeing motor oil by ~30%
Yes, it is a desperate option for fuel, can't win wars without sufficient fuel, fancy tanks, supply lines all required fuel
@@pckkaboo6800 I love that cat. So cute.
I'm a little sad that a channel like this gets less views and subs than something like "king of random" who boils seawater......... this channel deserves more subs!!!!
Yep, King of random is quite the garbage channel
People like things where they don't have to think.
@@stevenfeil7079 Well, it's not my case! I like to think!
Otherwise, i became dumb.
That was a nice cheap intro to wood gas. Great capture method similar to methane digester capture and use by weighting a sliding sleeve in a container. Appreciate the video..
Thank you, this will help me to give an example of how to create energy with biomass. God bless you!
"- dear, walk the parrot, please.
- ok, i'll take it to make some wood gas"
The parrot may be his best friend, but small birds are an amazing gas detector. In case you were wondering why coal miners were so fond of canaries.
It would be cool to see this compressed and running something like a stove or water heater
MrTessalonian ran a fridge and generator off of a wood gas generator
That is what used to be the town gas supply. You might be able to find my description in another comment but it is too long to repeat here.
Ramble on as led zeppelin sings. You addressed so many awesome questions. Fantastic episode thanks.
Ok guys this is the crocodile hunter of science! Dirty hands band aid green shirt makes him so reliable. Good luck man!
I got one of those Aussie *_"QUIT SMOKING"_* ads before the video. I think it thinks that I wanna use this thing to *SMOKE.*
Fill that tank with dank weed 👌
BIG SMONK
TH-cam be like: wanna see a hipster ted cruz make some wood smoke
IM NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES THIS LMFAO
Lol is thinking lumberjack Elijah Wood
And pronounce valve is a really strange way.
And... now I can’t unsee it... thanks
More like bigdawstv
your demonstration is awesome ......... thanks for your great efforts to showed us 🙏
Great job ! That was so awesome ! And the things you used for your experiment were simple ,but hey it worked !
if you put a condenser on the brake line (like a shine still) and then had the line running it to a jar with a lid to collect the tar and then a line out of the jar running to a compressor to compress the gas in to a lpg tank to collect it for future use, would that work? i may have to try it myself in the future. i will just have to make shure to get all the air out of the system before attempting to compress the gas so that it wont have a chance to ignite because of the pressure.
Condensing the smoke and that is hard to do in a small line without clogging it
I think the tar would/could condense and congeal in the condenser and plug it
Just make sure that you make enough gas at once, otherwise the compressor may not have enough gas to suck in which may not be that good for the compressor. I am not sure though, i don't know that much about compressors. Sorry for my bad English. But if it works, that would be really cool.
mayby have a larger copper line or just a t pipe coupling facing down and going in to a jar, there must be a way to extract the tar so that you can compress the gas. i think i will have to start tinkering with this now!
i think the compressor would work as a vacum pump so that is going to be a problem...
Hey Nighthawkinlight you should try bending the brake line at an angle in which it points the gas back into the oxygen intake to double the efficiency of your charcoal wood stove. P.s. If you make a small bubbler system for the gas to run through before going back into the stove, it will clean the gas before it burns
All you have to do to increase efficiency for charcoal is use my can with the holes in the lid but flip it upside down. The gas is ejected back into the fire.
Just remove the lid.
Put enough wood in to the can to make it "stick" when you turn it upside down. Place it in the rocket stove. Fill it with "enough" wood, and light it of. After a few runs you can tune it to the point where it produces great charcoal for BP. Charcoal produced when running it al the way to "completion" as in this video is overcooked, and doesn't work great for BP, but will do fine for pretty much anything other then pyo, where charcoal is needed.
Mr B what's BP
carolyn mmitchell black powder
By BP, you mean an activated charcoal?
I used to do this with a 50 gallon drum, layed horizontally on top of two cinder blocks at each end, pipes coming from the top (in the horizontal orientation) around to the bottom, where the holes to release it were. This had a three sided cinder block housing around it.
Fill the drum with wood, seal the lid, build a fire under it, and you're using the wood gas from the wood being pyrolized to reduce fuel required in processing into charcoal.
I was blacksmithing small trinkets & knives.
Umm...
Wood gas is typically produced on demand for automotive use.
The airflow from the intake of the engine is what pulls the wood gas out of the pyrolizer.
I can assure you that it doesn't burn clean, and that even after multiple stages of filtration, you're gonna get lots of tar build up.
This is still a problem with modern automotive pyrolizers, which typically use two twenty gallon tanks of filter material.
I still have a 70s mother earth news magazine with a article about fueling a vehicle with wood turned to gas. I haven't read it for about 15 years now but will b digging it out.
I want to see this done a second time, but with using a series of “doublers” where the gas is passed thru methyl alcohol and/or ethyl alcohol to capture methanol. Kind of like a thump keg or thumper in alcohol distillation. Weigh the quantities present both before and after to see if it collects some methanol, and also check the “proof” using a proof and tralles hydrometer. I bet it would work well.
Lmao he basically made a fish tank bong
Hahahahaha
Who drinking the water?
so should he try the same with weed? Wouldnt the smoke loose effect by being washed out in the whater
Prinz Eugen van Sovoyen No, water pipes have been used for a very long time as a means of filtering the smoke. It doesn’t negate the thc levels that produce the high
😂😂😂
This was really cool! I have been a fan of wood gas for a while now.
wow! nice vid. very very helpful vid.
that black liquid can be used in organic farming as pest control, improves soil quality, its called mokusaku (wood vinegar)
ive been searching on how to collect the gas, this by far is the best
thanks for giving me an idea on how to collect the gas very very helpful vid.
I'm starting a fundraiser to get NHIL an iron for his shirts.
GuildOfCalamity The initial steam proceeding wood gas would effectively remove those wrinkles! ; )
It's possible to make bio crude oil out of wood and algea could you possibly make something in a simple and easy method
Need more people like you
❤ the video and content.
Thank you for making this video. Very cool and I learned some things.
Brilliant! However, as a historian I must add that those kubelwagens in WWII were famously rubbish. Maybe a wood-gas native engine could be made to be more reliable, but most of what I read from the period, when they were mostly converted petrol platforms, is obscenities in four languages.
I would love to see a way of capturing the wood gas and transferring it to a pressurized filtered tank
Something like a hydraulic accumulator?
Thank you, I now know that I can use not only wood to make charcoal but also I can save the gas as fuel. mucho Appreciato
Thanks so much for this video. First time I heard of wood gas.
Now to find away to filter the smoke and tar out quickly and effectively!
They have ways of doing it on the fly with really simple apparatus's that look like a pan flute that essentially auto sorts different elements of the exhaust.
I realy enjoyed your video and I wondered if it were possible to get kind of liquide wood gas by using an liquide nitrogen cooler. Can you plase try it or at least explain why it isn't possible?
Methane is hard to liquefy. Might work but unlikely.
I've heard CO doesn't really like condensing, but with access to liquid N2 anything can happen. His attempt should at least be fun to watch.
Gilles Georges you realize car engines actually turn the liquid into gas? You would just run this straight to your engine. It would not be as efficient and your engine will be a little less powerful but I can still work.
Update. Liquid methane is 32,000kPa at room temp. LPG is 850kPa. Unless you carry around cryogenic insulation you'll need a strong container for liquid methane to not explode by thermal expansion.
AnantaSesaDas There are activated charcoals developed to almost liquidise CH4 by increasing its density. So you mean to say it may still explode?
Just one of your many superb videos!! Thank you sir.
Just found this vid now! I love this, and I don’t reckon you were rambling, everything was relevant! :)
nighthawk has the baby face of a Confederate general I mean that in a good way
He kind of looks like one of the Toy Story relatives Woody had.
0:17 homie recorded himself dragging on the bong for the audio effect.
Hits from the bong... Pick it. Pack it. Fire it up...
dude you litterally just made a massive bong for wood gas. amazing
Brilliant explanation of the process, cheers