Water to Fuel -- Charcoal Gasification: Part 1

Jared "Sparky" Pisell, of Off Grid Pro, Inc., walks us through an early introduction to the OpenFire, an open source charcoal gasification system.

Along with Troy Martz, Jared is the co-founder, co-designer and lead fabrication/production expert at OGP. The OpenFire is a charcoal gasification system, capable of producing clean, rich synthesis gas, consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Much like biomass gasifiers, our unit will produce energy from biomass, but unlike biomass gasifiers, this unit runs on fully pyrolyzed wood chips as its fuel, and not raw wood.

The wood chips are pyrolyzed in our modified double-barrel retort, capable of extremely fast batch runs in 1.5 hour range. This "fast" pyrolysis system will work with wood chips or pellets, and doesn't require grinding, sifting, or sorting. The finished product can be used directly as gasifier feedstock, or as biochar. Biochar, also known as terra preta, and when inoculated with beneficial soil microbes, brings many benefits to farmers and acts as a long-term carbon sink.

Carbon (charcoal) also acts as a catalyst for useful things like "cracking" steam. In other words, when steam is passed over a glowing hot bed of coals, or through a gasification core, the extreme temperatures will dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen from the H2O molecule, giving us 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom. This is very similar to HHO machines you may have seen on the internet, except this is a little different. Once this molecular dissociation occurs, the oxygen molecule -- when in the presence of carbon -- will prefer to bond with the carbon, thus making CO, or carbon monoxide, another burnable gas.

The OpenFire is a product that will provide a gas flow, capable of powering a range of engines. Anything between a small portable generator -- like our quad-fuel Honda generator -- all the way up to a industrial generator or large automobile, depending on the configuration.

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The OpenFire is registered under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA), the least restrictive license in existence. Any person, business, or government may reproduce, modify, and even sell this design with zero restrictions. We encourage it!!

We also encourage anyone with ideas to share. Our aim is to create best small-scale gasification system in the world.

We'd like to thank many people who helped us along the way with their pioneering work, engineering and design guidance, or plain old inspiration. There are many more who've helped along the way, but we'd like to especially thank:

Roy MacAlister, Jim Mason, Stephen Abbadessa, Wayne Keith, Gary Gilmore, and Koen Van Looken.

We'd also like to thanks Marcin Jakubowski, of Open Source Ecology, for his interest in making the OpenFire part of the "Global Village Construction Set."

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For more information about the product, please visit our website:
http://www.offgidpro.com

For information of open source hardware, please visit:
http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW

For more information on Open Source Ecology, please visit:
http://www.opensourceecology.org

Thanks!

Troy