My Home-Made Biomass Gasifier
Making your own gasifier is easy I've built a lot of alternative energy projects over the years. See my home-built solar panel and wind turbine pages. I've always wanted to build a wood or biomass gasifier too. Why? Well, the internal combustion engine is really an important part of our society and the basis of a lot of our transportation and portable power technology. It isn't going to be going away any time soon. I've mastered making my own electricity from the sun and wind, but that doesn't help my truck go down the road, power the lawn mower, or run my generator on cloudy, windless days. Those all have internal combustion engines, and they all need fuel to run. I finally decided it was time to master making my own fuel. Why pay the Arabs for it if I can make a working substitute myself?

So what is A biomass gasifier? Basically is a chemical reactor that converts wood, or other biomass substances, into a combustible gas that can be burned for heating, cooking, or for running an internal combustion engine. This is achieved by partially combusting the biomass in the reactor, and using the heat generated to pyrolyse or thermally break down the rest of the material into volatile gasses.

A well built reactor will also convert combustion byproducts like CO2 and water vapor into flammable CO and H2 by passing them over a bed of hot charcoal where they will get reduced.

Thus the gasifier converts most of the mass of the wood (or other biomass feedstock) into flammable gasses with only some ash and unburned charcoal residue. That is the theory anyway. This is an extreme over-simplification of how the gasifier really works. Wood and other biomass is made of incredibly complex macro-molecules like Cellulose and Lignin that break down into hundreds or thousands of different smaller molecules as the reaction proceeds. There are