gassification in internal combustion engines

anyone here tried this?

http://www.gengas.nu/byggbes/contents.shtml

it's a wood gassifier. for use in an internal combustion engine.

used widely in ww2 apparently.  

just wondering what people think.
maybe i'll build one sometime... i'll probably just experiment, and lose interest...

it does use a lot of wood i guess. too much for EVERYONE to do it, especially for a prolonged period of time, though, maybe it would be good to say "well, this wood i have here, is all the transportation i can do the rest of the year with a car...

it'd be good people who are off the grid anyway....
or large scale farming.    cause, hey, at least this is a renewable resource yes no?

I know a couple people who have collected some of the parts that could be used to build a gassifier. Neither are anywhhere close to assembly and it's been a decade or more. They were used quite a bit in WWII Europe as petro fuels were restricted for civilian use.

it doesn't seem much more complicated than a rocket stove to me, except that you have to know how to weld...      perhaps i'll build one,and post pictures.

    I'm new to the Rocket stove but I have built a biomass gasifire for my 360cdi class B motorhome. Yes, the rocket stove is clearly using the gasifying effect. There is a company making a 'gasifying' wood stove that user's large water tanks for thermal mass like your rocketstove seats. I saw it at the PA Energy fest.

Woody

It's actually a very complicated process, one needs to be sure the gas is cleaned of tars otherwise the engine is gunked up badly.  If you're really interested in the process I suggest looking at the following.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WoodGas
http://www.gekgasifier.com/
http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/

These were also popular (Traction engine) but pales in comparison to a modern tractor.  I'd take a diesel tractor for doing serious work as opposed to a wood gassifier. The only reason that these came into production was that there were wartime shortages of petrol and diesel. They use a lot of wood, are finicky, aren't particular efficient, and take ages to get up to operating temperature.

If you're serious about work get a tractor. 

SamEEE wrote:If you're serious about work get a tractor. 

As a corollary to that, if you're serious about reducing your fossil fuel use, find a way to get similar results by doing less work (and I mean "work" in the physics sense of the word: mass times acceleration times distance).

Fossil fuels have their current place in the economy because, where they're available, they're the most convenient and reliable way to apply large amounts of energy, quickly, in a particular place.