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
gaurav, Once the gasifier is started, there is nothing emmited by it. While it is warming up, it puts out the same as a small wood stove or camp fire. The woodgas consists of mostly hydrogen and CO and after it goes through the engine, the emmisions tests are usually cleaner than with gasoline. I have to dump some ash and charcoal and some condensate but the vegetation seems to grow better when this is applied sparingly. It has a lot of nutrients in it. Mike
I think it is fantastic for the environment. Burning wood is renewable. Therefore doesn’t increase overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere as long as we plant enough trees to replace what we use. Also better for our economy. What we see here is 1930s technology. If a car company produced a modern equivalent I think it would be a viable alternative. Some improvements could be - Wood gas reserve pressure tank to enable cold starts, exhaust heat to assist in the wood breakdown, automatic timing adjustments to handle other fuels like paper etc.
Alas …. while petrol is still affordable and we don’t mind all of our money going overseas to pay for it commonsence alternatives like this are going to remain a hobby.
Adding onto my last post. Many bio fuels use up resources that we need as food eg Corn, wheat, sugar etc which sends up world food prices. Wood doesn’t. Also with a little hydrogen injection any hydocarbon scraps could be used as a fuel. Come on car companies do some real innovation.
I and two other people are at the present time building a wood gas geherator, we plan on running a ford dlat bed truck with it, We in three days got every thing welded up and on the stand that holds the burner and the ash cleaner, we plan on firing it up this coming week.
Also at the presint time I have built a three grid hydrogen generator and have designed it to where the water never gets over 78 degrees, I ran it at two hundred amps 12V DC for three hours and this as high as the tempture ever got, I plan on installing it on my car this coming week.
After futher test I plan on setting up a web sight to sell the plans and instructions for $25.00 this includes postage in the USA, and for the ones that like to order itens then copy them, then try to get their money refunded, I plan on putting a seal on the package with the plans and insreuctions, if the seal has been broken then they can not get a refund, and beleave me they will have to break the seal to open the package.
I was reading a little bit about producer gas vehicles used in WWII and not only was wood used but also coal and other types of solid fuel. Apparently the gasses produced to fuel the engine are highly toxic, but as the engine combusts the gasses, the emissions of CO don’t seem to be any higher than older gasoline engines. With catalytic converters and other modern technology, they could probably be designed to run very clean. Of course using wood as an alternative fuel today is not a realistic solution, but perhaps coal or some other readily available solid fuel could be used and might be just the solution to reduce dependance on oil for certain limited applications!