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Fun fact, an engine with a carburetor can very very easily run on biomass, wood or dried grass, via gasification. Essentially, a large sealed container with a fire under it, or a fuel deprived fire inside of a container, will produce a large amount of combustible gas that can be bubbled through some water to clean/cool it a bit, and then fed straight in to the carburetor. No modification to the engine required, although a bit of tuning will get better performance. It doesn’t work with a fuel injection engine unfortunately, and basically all modern cars are fuel injected. It will also have less performance than with gasoline as the gas is less energy dense.
Nighthawk in light did a video on it with a little motorized bike, his results weren’t the best as his design wasn’t great but the engine did run. There are a ton of examples of people running vehicles surprisingly well on these kinds of system though, usually older pickup trucks as the bed gives a good spot to put the gasifier.
combustible gas
Which contains a whole lot of carbon monoxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Make sure that shit is sealed well because those PAHs will give you super cancer if you breathe it in while riding your bike. And don't play with the "tar" without extensive PPE because that shit is concentrated PAH carcinogens.
Are you saying americans shouldn't give themselves preventable illnesses?
You know that's basically cultural genocide, right?
Yah breathing in smoke from a fire is generally ill advised. So is huffing gasoline. Or leaving a car running in a garage.
Generally I think the sealed container with a charcoal fire compartment underneath is a better way of doing it than a partial combustion one, simply because it is much easier to seal it up properly, and you end up getting a better mix of combustibles.
You've got a significant misunderstanding on the level I'm talking about. Incomplete pyrolysis creates cancer causing compounds in the percentage level, gasoline and smoke has it in the parts per million. It's multiple orders of magnitude more toxic. Gasoline fumes, wood smoke, and car exhaust are like breathing clean air compared to this shit.
The regulation for the average content of benzene in US gasoline is .62% and the WHO, as of march, classifies gasoline in its totality as a IARC group 1 Carcinogen.
Group 1 does not denote risk, just that it is definitely carcinogenic.
Again I’m not diminishing the fact some products of pyrolysis produced in significant amounts are very hazardous and carcinogenic, but I think you underestimate gasoline.
Industrial producer gas generally produces 5 percent aromatics by weight of feedstock with their light tar(the stuff diy gasifiers have to clean out) being roughly 70 percent benzene and toulene. There's not data on diy gasifiers but expect it to be worse, with more varied polycyclics that likey much more toxic that aren't particularly filtered out by bubbling it through water. These heavy polycyclics are generally eliminated in the gasoline cracking stage.