Re: GAS-L: Deja Vu Producer Gas

[Joacim Persson <joacim@artech.se>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000 Reedtb2@cs.com wrote:

> I never thought of producer gas vehicles as a way to beat the fuel taxes. 
> Interesting idea.  Eventually any fuel will have to support fuel taxes or 
> what will pay for the roads.  However, in the development phase when the new 
> fuel is less than 10% of the total mix governments will probably forgive tax 
> or even subsidize if they see it in their interest.  Ethanol was highly 
> subsidized in France between the wars and made considerable progress.  

Ethanol is still subsidised, but by the EU now: the ethanol is produced
from excess wine, made from subsidised grapes. I wonder what the total
efficiency of *that* system is. =)



> In the period 1950-1970 there was a great deal of work done at the National 
> Swedish Testing Institute for Agricultural Machinery uder the direction in 
> part of Eric Johansson.  I wonder if he is still alive.   

The centre in Umeå? They still work a little with producer gas, but all
governmental funding of it ended a few years ago. Rumor has it they now do
producer gas work for "private enterprise" (being a little secretive about
it too I'm told)

> They did the work in part to adapt producer gas to modern Saabs and Volvos 
> and they came up with interesting designs for both wood blocks and wood 
> chips.  Is there any single document that records that research.  The biomass 
> Energy Foundation could possibly be interested in translating and publishing 
> that as a sequel to Gen-Gas (in English).  
> 
> Can you find out about that?  

I search the library databases...no luck. There were just a few articles
and student essays on producer gas of later date, and quite a few old,
pre-ww2, ones (including one with the somewhat self-confident title: "Tar
and soot free producer gas" from 1910 =)  There may have been plans for a
sequel, but it seems it was never written, or at least not published.

There is a gasifier called the "Volvo-gasifier", developed by Volvo on the
behalf of a defense branch (Office of Civil Preparedness, ÖCB, or some
other agency). I've only seen a diagram of it in a book at the library; it
didn't look very peculiar though; just a monorator + V-hearth; something
easy to build in case of an emergency. Volvo's motor factory is located not
far from where I live, and there have been rumors from time to time about
strange-looking producer gas-powered vehicles rolling in the vicinity. Last
time I've heard of any was in the early 1990's.

 
> You are right about the relative energy content of wood Vs oil, but 
> pelletization brings biomass to a density of >1.0 at which point it is only 
> twice as bulky as petroleum, so maybe shipping into cities isn't too bad and 
> certainly in your "Taiga" region it will be fine.  

I think they have better alternatives in the cities though. The
urbanisation process usually stabilise around a 15% rural population. Since
I'm part of that 15% myself, the problems there concerns me more than the
problems they have in the cities and towns. Since politicians are
interested in votes, they all tend to go for the other 85% whenever there
are conflicting interests. So they raise the fuel tax to prevet pollution i
the cities; to make the people there use public transport instead. Were
there are no alternatives, it has no other effect but breaking down
society. It's pointless to flog a horse tied to a pole, so to speak.

 
> We are currently developing new "tarfree-turnkey" gasifier systems which will 
> have raw gas tar less than 20 ppm and won't need the extensive filtering that 
> the old Imbert gasifiers needed.  The "turnkey" piggybacks on the wonderful 
> clean technology for cars that has been developed in the last decade.  I hope 
> we can bring these technologies together.  

There's lots of things that could be done with modern sensors, servos,
computers etc.  A lambda sond could be coupled to a servo on the gas mixer
to blend the gas automatically for instance. That should be fairly simple
to rig. ...and think of how easy it could be to collect and process data
nowadays, compared with the lab equipment they had half a century years
ago.

Incidently, to compensate for the previous charcoal gasifier article, I've
since taken the liberty to translate another old article about a wood
gasifier improvement; Prof. Kyrklund's article about the laboratory tests
of the "monorator" in Helsinki, Finland, in the spring of 1945.
Link from: http://www.artech.se/~joacim/gengas/
(html and postscript, Swedish and English as before); the diagrams were
remade from the original (too poor quality of the scans to be useful). I
tried to make them follow the scanned images the best I could, but don't
take the "data" too literal. ...I have a vague memory of another, earlier,
brief article about it, but I couldn't find it.


Joacim
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