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
Instead of using up oil lets just cut down even more trees and more deforestation to power our cars! We already have a huge problem with deforestation. This is not the answer and might even be worse than just using oil..
I have submitted your article to http://www.autocar-live.com which is a social site where users can submit car/auto articles and vote for already submitted articles.
Global warming - you believe everything you hear. If only everyone was a scientist like Al Gore…….
JackHammer said on May 14th, 2008 at 5:51 am
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.
The US education system is not as bad nor sad as you are. Because a few posters had not heard of the wood-gas concept you decide to use this as a basis to condemn an entire population. In fact you have been trolling the Internet looking for ways to spread your hatred of the US using the default excuse “it is the USA’s fault etc.”
In fact wood-gas powered vehicles are not practical unless other fuel isn’t available. Wood is not very energy dense as compared to gasoline or even alcohol.
In WW2 wood-gas was used as an emergency fuel. An engine using wood-gas was very difficult to start, required a long preparation time to get the generator working and large quantities of wood. Does this sound like the way forward? No. Wood-gas is at best a niche technology.
Resolve you hatred of the US privately please. The Americans are leaders in many technologies. You are only hurting yourself by simply disregarding whatever they say or do.
It is no hoax. I have ridden in that truck.
The basics are this…you burn some of the wood to provide heat to gasify the remaining wood. Woodgas contains CO, H2 and a little CH4 and some inert gases.
Mixed with about 1:1 ratio with fresh air and an internal combustion engine runs on it quite well…in fact the exhaust is much cleaner.
There are limitations…the gas mix has a very slow flame front, so maximum usable rpm is around 2500. This is why the larger engined vehicles are better for conversion to woodgas.
It has less energy than gasoline, so you will only get around 80% of the power your engine would make on gasoline at 2500 rpm. The gas comes out pretty hot, and contains some ash and tar as well, so filtering and cooling are important. The cooler the gas going into the engine, the more power is produced. That is what the various canisters and pipes accomplish.
The owner of this particular vehicle has several wood powered vehicles, and is good at designing woodgas generators on a shoe string which work well and produce little to no tar compounds (tar compounds will stick up the valve train on your engine). His wood had a bit of extra water in it the day these pictures were taken, and he had opened up the air filter to allow it to dry while he was in town. He was still refining the use of this one, as it is his newest conversion.
For those of you worried about deforestation,The amount of wood waste from industry that ends up in a land fill is devastating.In Pennslyvania alone 7 million tons of wood waste ends up in a landfill a year. I have built a gassifier and use it.It creates less CO2 than a gasoline engine,and I also get my wood as waste from a small manufacturer.Wood that would end up going to a landfill.So not only am I reducing emmissions but also using energy that would be thrown away.Large industries are revaluateing gasification technology.It can be used to produce eletricity,heat and remove waste all at the same time,while emmitting less pollutents in our atmosphere than our coal burning electricity plants.Gasification coal burning plants are 96% cleaner than regular coal burning plants. Check it out for yourselves.
Deforestation to power your vehicle…. Not really all the wood that is consumed in the production of woodgas is almost always waste wood. Wood that would end up in the land fill or chipped up, for making mulch. All wood decays producing the same amount of CO2 as it has consumed in the life cycle of the tree. The same amount of CO2 is produced by gasification. The net effect is zero additional CO2 emissions.
Here in Nebraska we just had a huge storm pass though. Lots of trees were blown down. I now have enough ELM to fuel my truck for several years, if I convert what has been given to me into fuel.
There is enough waste wood around to fuel a lot of vehicles. Woodgas is not the solution to global warming but it is not contributing to it either. Woodgas contains a significant amount of hydrogen; the water in the wood is actually cracked to form HHO gas in usable amounts. When the hydrogen combusts, if forms H2O again. Now that you know you can drive on wood just take an extra look around and you will see how much wood is just going to waste…..
Jonathan
http://www.woodgas.net
I prefer the Air Car video on GreenEnergyTV.com This car does run on air and hope to drive one of these soon!
Here is a link to the video: http://greenenergytv.com/Watch.aspx?1213869141
Pete
Just watched a eco documentary called planet mechanics here in the UK. The lads converted a pick up truck to run on wood only, the only engine mod required was a home made carb for mixing the gas and air. Fact is burning the dried wood produced less emissions than the unleaded fuel in all areas inlcluding carbon monoxide and particulates. Running a car on wood has zero carbon foot print, think about it. The wood has had to be grown and trees produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Providing the wood is taken from renewable sources what’s the problem?
The lads estimated that two sacks of wood (36kgs) gave a range of about 150 miles. Given the price of petrol here in the UK which is currently about 10 bucks a gallon. Wood works out to be not only much cheaper but cleaner. If one was to design a commercial wood burning producer suitable for all car motors then surely this would be a good thing for the enviroment providing renewable sources of wood were used.
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