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If I could convert my yard grass and weeds and vines clippings and tree limb prunings into fuel at almost no cost to me, I could run my van for a year or more on that stuff. cuhulin
Hell, if you're in to iffin', if you won the Powerball Lottery, you could buy a new van and run it on premium.
The answer is that of course you can.. This kind of research was done on a small farm basis years ago.
The PhD Aussie had a convertor that was dead simple and converted chicken caca and other waste into methane. So, YES, it can be done.
If you cant find it (check Mother Earth News, old editions) I can probably dig it up.
If you don't have to travel very far you could get a donkey or large goat.
if you figure out how to do that then let me know. i think its just some sort of a distillation process. can you drink that stuff too?
Chicken caca?? I guess you can if you wish.
Methanogenic bacteria can produce crude methane from a variety of composting media. Poops, plant media, animal remains, etc.
Put it in a "reactor" and clean and compress the resultant bioemissions.
Of course if you try this crap in any area where the temperature drops below about 60 degrees you might find that crisco doesn't pump so well... BUT hey it's cheap!!!
I like how the "how it works" page details how this "German Engineer" worked with Mercedes who designed some of the first production diesels AFTER WW2.
Amazing how many diesels were running long before that time...
There are some people in England who own a few very old one cylinder diesel outboard boat engines.They use blowtorches to first heat up the cylinder dome hot enough so that the engines will start running.
Rudolph Diesel first intended to make his engines run on powered coal.The first, or one of the first engines, he built blew up and nearly killed him.Back in the 1970s Cadillac (Cadillac first built bicycles before they started building cars.Cadillac sort of had ties with Henry Ford too, if you want to look on the web for, History of Cadillac Cars) (speakng of Cadillac, I own a Cadillac two speed electric industrial grade blower.It says on the metal name/data plate on the blower, Clements Cadillac.Clements MFG Co.Chicago, USA) Cadillac (the car company) was experimenting with running a Cadillac car engine on powerded coal, coal that was ground up to the consisenticy of baby powder.Cadillac built some Tanks during World War Two. cuhulin
Heck the hot bulb diesel isn't that out of date. Take a look at the engines being produced today in India. They are still making hot bulb ignited diesels and running them on just about whatever will burn.
I have a couple OLD engines myself and just love to hear people who talk about how "current" diesel technology is. If you start looking through the past in engine history you will discover that just about everything has been tried at least once. About the only real breakthrough in the past 20 years is the computer controls for engines. All the rest has been around for a LONG time.
Electric cars, Steam cars, Fuel injection, turbine power, variable displacement engines, fuel cells, hydrogen power, alternative fuels (peanut oil, soybean oil, alcohol, wood gas, coal gas, LPG) Solar. Most were being touted as breakthroughs before Henry Ford started building the Model-T.
When I first went offshore in the North Sea, the survival craft (Whittaker or Hardy) were powered by one cylinder diesel engines. You released the pressure on the cylinder and started turning the engine over by hand (IIRC). Then return pressure to the cylinder and sometimes they would start. They had an auxiliary "cigarette" that you could use to try to get them to fire if the other method didnt work.
I have never been in one of the newer Swedish design ballistic craft. These drop nose down from the platform and travel underwater for a good distance to get you away from the platform, before they finally resurface. I dont know what engines they have, if any.
Lindsay Publications has a book or two on how to do this. Basically it uses destructive distillation to boil off combustible vapors from wood products. This was used a lot during WW2 in both Europe and the Phillipines.
Set it up as a methane generator, and you dont have to distill anything. The methane comes off ready to compress and use.
You can use grass clippings, pig poop, a variety of things.
It's the compression that is the difficulty. The advantage of the receiver gas is that you can do the destructive distillation in a 55 gallon drum on a 2-wheel trailer or mounted to the back of the vehicle. Fill it with old coconut husks, get the fire started, and after half an hour or so the pressure of producer gas (which includes alcohols, ethane, and carbon monoxide as well as a lot of inert junk like water vapor) has built up to the point where you can drive away.
There were jeepneys in Manila with producer gas generators as late as the mid-sixties. My recollection of them is that they did not smell very good, nor were they reliable.
--scott
I remember seeing a picture of an early European car, French I believe, that ran on pyrolisate of almond shells. Sure, it is a technology that works.
The methane generator indeed needs a simple compressor to handle the gas, as you say.
The water gas reaction of steam with coal could also be used, but is hard to control in small applications, does nothing to reduce the "carbon footprint".
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