DIY Trash-Powered Gasification Car (Video)
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA 
on 01. 5.09
Honda Accord Runs on Trash
We’ve got excited about waste gasification before, especially at news of the first US waste gasification facility. We’ve even got excited about DIY wood gasification. But howabout the folks at All Power Labs creators of the open source Gasifier Experimenter’s Kit in Oakland, California, who have converted their Honda Accord to run, cleanly they say, on anything from walnut shells to wood chips? Read on to learn how they did it…
Gasification is the use of heat to tranform solid biomass, or other carbonaceous solids, into a synthetic "natural gas like" flammable fuel. Through gasification, we can convert nearly any solid dry organic matter into a clean burning, carbon neutral, gaseous fuel. Whether starting with wood chips or walnut shells, construction debris or agricultural waste, the end product is a flexible gaseous fuel you can burn in your internal combustion engine, cooking stove, furnace or flamethrower. Or in this case, your DeLorean. Well ok, how about a Honda Accord . . . Sound impossible?Did you know that over one million vehicles in Europe ran onboard gasifiers during WWII to make fuel from wood and charcoal, as gasoline and diesel were rationed or otherwise unavailable? Long before there was biodiesel and ethanol, we actually succeeded in a large-scale, alternative fuels redeployment-- and one which curiously used only cellulosic biomass, not the oil and sugar based biofuel sources which famously compete with food.
Click through to the ever wonderful Instructables for a step-by-step account of building your own gasifier-powered vehicle. Of course we still love bikes, we may have better uses for biomass once the oil stops flowing, and this particular set of wheels won't win any points for looks, but it is nice to know we have options.
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What would be truly nice is a mix of gasification +electric.
They should figure out a way to downsize this technology not just for cars but also as a renewable, efficient heating source for homes and businesses.
FYI, Mother Earth Magazine did an article about this with a pickup truck decades ago.
What are the emissions like? Quite a bit of smoke on startup!
hi, this is one of the builders of the car. some answers to commons questions about this.
yes, the premise here is very old. we're just trying to show how accessible this tech is to upgrading with contemporary tech and open source innovation methods.
the honda is based off a kit we have developed that allows people to easily step into gasification, and have a common base ontop of which to refine, collaborate and improve things. the kit is called the Gasifier Experimenters Kit (GEK). see here: http://www.allpowerlabs.org/gasification/gek/index.html
you can build the kit from sheetmetal and parts we supply. or you can build it from obtainium scrap tanks. we've chosen dimensions that are common with scrap so you have multiple paths to realize the same end product.
hardware open source projects are hard. replication is not free nor is it perfect in the world of hardware. also, ADD is less adaptive in physical building than in coding environments. all of this only gets more the further you move away from electronics and into the world of metal, fire and mechanical machines. but this is what we are trying to do.
the GEK is somewhat of a project of applying contemporary high tech to some of the lowest and oldest tech around. after spears, it was pretty much fire. and after fire, it was pretty much gasification. well, the wheel and lever are in there somewhere. but gasification is very early on the list. it was first figured out in steel refining. the first internal combustion engines ran on gasifier gas. no one had petroleum fuels at that point. refined liquid petroleum fuels are very late in the story of engines.
and yes, the emissions from an engine burning gsifier gas can be extremely clean. you are oxidizing co and h2. each only has one step to the end products of combustion, co2 and h2o. most liquid fuels are starting with very complicated molecules, usually in the neighborhood of c7h14, and going through many interim steps before ending at co2 and h2o. not everythign makes it through all these steps. thus hydrocarbon emissions.
a gasifier is essentially doing all the "precombustion" steps, making the engine somewhat of an afterburner. now getting the gasifier started and working well can be a gigantic mess, but once it is running, the total system if very clean.
when things are in order, the honda would likely beat a brand new prius at the smog station.
jim
ps- the actual energy density of biomass is around 21MJ/kg. gas/diesel is around 42MJ/kg i believe. the density is about half. but a gasifier used energy to convert the biomass from a solid to a gas. typical efficiency is about 70%. when all the honda heat exchange things are in place, i'll likely be in the 80-90% range.
also, with a gasifier you can start to use the waste heat from the ic engine to prepare your fuel, as well as "amend" it though adding steam to the gasifier to produce more hydrogen. such offers a "easier" way to mine the 70% waste heat out of an IC engine than trying to capture that heat through some shaft output device.
Jim Mason
Website: http://www.whatiamupto.com
Current Projects:
- Gasifier Experimenters Kit (the GEK): http://www.allpowerlabs.org/gasification/gek
- Escape from Berkeley alt fuels vehicle race: www.escapefromberkeley.com
Announce list: http://lists.spaceship.com/listinfo.cgi/icp-spaceship.com
Why not take the syngas produced by the gasifier and feed it into a chamber filled with scrap iron which would act as a catalyst in the Fischer Tropsch reaction and produce liquid fuel from the syngas.
If you kept the temperature of the reaction chamber at 330C you would get gasoline. If you kept it at 180C, you would get diesel.
Then you wouldn't have to drive around with a burning trash can strapped to your car.