Continuous

Do these gas generators do batches of wood at a time or continuous burning of new wood as needed?

Offered by Mike.

The lid of the fuel (wood) reservoir may not be opened when the engine is running. If you do so all the wood in the reservoir will burn immediately. But it is no problem to stop the engine, open the lid, refuel and start again. Of course you can make the fuel reservoir as big as you like to have longer operating time before refueling.

Offered by Olli.

A very simple overview of my current (paper) design utilizes two or more 50 gallon drums inside a fire-brick oven. The idea is to have one or more of the drums producing wood-gas at all times. The output of each drum is cooled by bubbling the gas through cool water which would condense any water from the wood-gas into the water it is bubbling through. From this cooling/separation chamber would flow pure wood-gas. That is then pumped into a tank which is fitted with a gas pressure regular to provide gas to a engine.

The idea is to have at least one 50 gallon drum always producing wood-gas while the other is either off-line being emptied of charcoal/filled with new wood, being heated and driving off water vapor which would be separated in the water separator, or producing wood-gas. Each drum would have a pressure gauge (or simple "bubblier") so that when all the wood-gas has been extracted one could know this. At that point, a valve would be closed, isolating that drum. The charcoal from that drum would be emptied so that the
charcoal is added to the fuel heating the fire-brick oven and new wood added to the drum. The drum is again sealed and the valve opened so that the water driven off would be separated by the water separator. As wood-gas escapes the separator it is added to the wood-gas from the other drum(s) to be pressurized and stored by the pump. When the wood-gas from the other drum is exhausted, the cycle repeats itself. The more drums in the system, the more gas is produced.

Offered by Ron.