Run Your Car on Wood? No Joke.
I’ve heard of making fuel from wood before, but rarely does using wood as fuel come up. However, just today I was pointed to this site, hosted by a local radio station, with a real-life example of someone burning wood as a fuel in his truck.
I can’t say for sure how the system works, whether it’s dual fuel or the wood-burning supplies all the fuel the engine needs, but it doesn’t appear to be a hoax and is certainly interesting. Evidently, during WWII, there was some experimenting with alternative fuels (due to shortages caused by the war), and one of the results was the wood burning automobile.
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I can’t comment on emissions, but something tells me this practice would be not the choice of people concerned about air quality or GHGs. Another problem I see is that wood is not very energy dense compared to liquid fuels, meaning you would need a lot of trees and a big “wood tank” to get any sort of range out of your wood-powered vehicle (WPV).
That said, this WPV is definitely on the neat side of things. For another real-life example, check out a truck that runs on coffee grounds.
See two more pictures below, and for more, visit this site.
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Image credit: Claire L. Evans at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
The truck is powered by what’s known as “producer gas” and it’s not really very efficient. Kind of nice if you’ve got nothing else, but not if you can run your car off of something like say alcohol. There was an engineer in Yugoslavia who converted his Yugo to run on the stuff when the country was cut off from the rest of the world due to sanctions.
You can read a bit about producer gas here: http://members.tripod.com/~cturare/eng.htm
A how-to book on the subject can be found here: http://lindsaybks.com/bks4/mathot/index.html
Found the website on the wood powered Yugo. It actually runs slightly BETTER on producer gas, but that’s not really saying much seeing as how it’s a Yugo.
http://freeweb.deltha.hu/zastava.in.hu/wood-gas.htm
This is supposed to be a viable alternative? Where is a cheap source of wood going to come from? Have none of you heard of steam powered trains, which burned wood and coal starting in the USA in 1930? Guess what happened? A quote form Wiki:
“Up to around 1850 in the U.S.A the vast majority of locomotives burnt wood until most of the Eastern forests were cleared; from that time on coal burning became more widespread and wood burners were restricted to rural and logging districts. In Europe, this lasted well into the 20th century.”
hoax you scrub. wtf is going to power the engine?
During the second world war, cars driving on wood was common in Denmark.
Burning wood for producer gas is an age old technique. In several countries after the WWII it was used to replace ordinary fuels. It is not really enviromentally friendly or efficient, but does provide (almost) free fuel.
Here are some finnish examples.
The fact that this made digg and most of you people think it is something new or neat is an excellent example of how bad the US education system really is. Sad, really.
An older Finnish friend of mine, now deceased, spent many hours telling me of his experience during WWII. The Finns rigged their military vehicles to run on the gas given off by charcoal and were able to successfully fight off the invading Russians.
Um …..
DEFORESTATION
GLOBAL WARMING
Lets just run the car in the garage with all the exits closed — it’s quicker
Are we talking about converting to fuel a natural resource that is getting scarcer than oil?
That is not big news,not here in scandinavia at least.
Here in Finland these contraptions were quite common
during and after WWII.