Making fuel from wood.

I'm building a syngas generator and was planing to run a duel fuel generator of it and was planing that I could make some diesel from the woodgas produced.
If I could use woodgas to power the generator that produce the power needed to do the process I might be able to use woodgas as gas and the diesel produced as the second fuel and maybe a little extra to pour into my tractor and boat.

I was reading that this could be done under 1-10bar pressure and with some steam and temperatures 150-300C and come iron (fe) as a catalysis.
I was wondering what happens here and my guess is that carbons in the woodgas is forming hydrocarbons with the hydrogen in the water after the iron and oxygen has reacted with each other creating good old rust.

Any experts on this mater?
Any resources? goggle only provided me with formulas and not a good idea how to make a plant.

 

SM,

I don't have your answer I'm afraid. Did you try typing your question into Google? The whole question? You may be surprised at the results. Changing the way you ask the question, even just one word, may make all the difference.

Good luck, and don't forget, wood is fuel.

-Tom

 

http://www.woodgas.net/

 

Yes

Tried and tried and did not get any practical out of it.'
Just theory.

Thanks Tom

And this is helping me how? I already know how to make the gas.

 

if there was an easy way to make diesel from wood it would be done

 

The Germans did it in big scale 70 years ago.
Most of the fuel they used during WW2 vas from syngas.

 

they did it out of necessity because they had no oil

not because it was cost effective

 

A remarkably busy forum, maybe it's full of nuts. I haven't looked for years....

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WoodGas/

Maybe you're talking something different. I always thought woodgas was a gas like air, not a liquid like gasoline. But there was talk of an ethanol distillery around here that will use wood chips.

 

Actually the Germans use anything they could get their hands on to make fuel. Wood, potatos, coal.

 

There is, and there are a number of pilot scale plants in operation and a commercial scale one being built in Germany.

It's called Fischer - Tropsch (FT) Diesel and it's made by reforming syngas into longer chain molecules in the presence of a catalyst. The wiki link provides a pretty good overview of the process and it's applications. The Air Force has done a lot of development work on it and nearly all jet aircraft in the fleet are certified to run on FT jet fuel. FT diesel is more stable than biodiesel and therefore easier to store and run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

FT fuels can also be made from coal and this has been suggested as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil since the US is coal rich and relatively oil poor. Running on coal doesn't do anything to help global warming, but once built the plants can also be run on biomass which is carbon neutral.

 

You may find useful info starting here: http://www.biodieseldiscussion.com/ .

The best place to look for details is the alt.sci.chem forum on usenet. There used to be a brilliant chemist called "uncle Al", extremely rude towards stupid questions but helpful in other cases. Several petrochemical engineers frequent that forum.

What you are contemplating involves heating pressurized inflammable mixtures far beyond their combustion temperatures. That's the 'don't do this at home' category!

 

http://www.changingworldtech.com/what/index.asp

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/19/the_return_of_nazi_oil.php

 

I read briefly into this as a result of this thread and I am left scratching my head.

They said on one of these links that a hundred something gallon tank of syngas pressurized to 3000lbs pressure (or something like that), could only move a car a couple miles.

Why is this something worthy of pursuit?

I would imagine just using a turbine or two and a real wood fire would be more efficient, no?

 

For some it's a hobby.. http://www.juhasipila.fi/7 The pages are in finnish but maybe Google translates something understandable. He's my former boss from 20 years back and one kind of enthusiast for woodgas..

 

Ok, that makes sense. I thought people were looking at it for marine propulsion for some reason.