crazy question but--if you burn wood in a low oxygen environment you get syngas which is in essence methanol right?! Well can I mix ethanol and syngas in 50/50 and get decent titration when used for making bioD?

Burning wood in a low AIR environment (air being only about 30% oxygen to begin with) produces woodgas, not true syngas, although many use these names interchangably. From what I have read syngas is produced by excluding all the AIR and burning the wood with only a small amount of pure oxygen, this eliminates the large nitrogen component in the produced gas.

Woodgas is not liquid, it is a true gasious mix of roughly (depending on MANY veriables) 15-20% carbon monoxide, 10-20% carbon dioxide, 5-20% hydrogen, 50-60% nitrogen, and only a few percent of methane , it is the small amount of methane that can be chemically converted into liquid methanol but this is much more complicated than simple garage chemistry, and the amount of methanol produced from burning wood would be very small.

syngas from gasification is the thermal conversion of "something" in low O2 environment. Pyrolysis is burning it in NO oxygen environment. From my understanding distilling wood alcohol (methanol) comes from the destructive thermal conversion of wood (or other biomass) in a low air environment. If it is not methanol, then what is the liquid you get from this process?
Tim

I have also read that overly simple discription of producing alcohol from wood, ain't nearly that simple. From reading about the process you get all sorts of vapors driven from the wood, only a small portion is methane, even to get that the temp of the process needs to be controled, you then have to seperate the methane from everything else, then react it under pressure with steam and a catalyst to produce liquid methanol, something like that anyway, wasn't going to try it so didn't research it that closely.

Based on my own testing after building a simple FEMA-style stratified downdraft gasifier, the liquid you get from the output of a simple (meaning anything you or I are likely to build) gasifier is mostly water and wood tars.

We are now moving ahead and building a Imbert-style gasifier.

The upper portion of the gasifier burns the outer surface of the raw wood to produce heat, this heat penetrates into the interior of the burning wood faster than it can burn, the interior heat drives out the water moisture and wood tars (resins), this process creates charcoal, as the wood/charcoal chunks burn and become smaller in size they move downward inside the gasifier, a plug of glowing charcoal is formed below the burning wood, the vapors and tars from the burning wood are drawn through the glowing charcoal, the almost complete lack of free oxygen, and the heat from the char, create pyrolitic reactions that crack the hot non-burning vapors into there various components. If the glowing char is not up around 2000 deg f., and the original raw wood contained a lot of moisture, there will be a lot of the water vapor and tars that are not reacted, these pass out of the gasifier as hot vapor but soon cool and condense someplace inside the plumbing or gas cooling radiator unit.

The glowing charcoal cracks the various gasses from the burning area, mainly carbon dioxide, that is converted to flammable carbon monoxide (one carbon is pulled from the charcoal to produce two CO molecules from each CO2 molecule), and water vapor, that is cracked into free hydrogen. If the charcoal temps are below a couple thousand degrees f. you get much more water vapor and tars getting past the charcoal, if the glowing charcoal temps are up around the 2000 deg f point then most of the water and tars are cracked into flamable vapors.

Myself and a couple other local fellows are testing wood gasifier designs, we get a continuous thin stream, or at least a fast dripping, from the gas cooling radiator even when burning very dry construction scrap through the gasifer, if the burning wood is above about 50% moisture content the moisture in the wood keeps the glowing charcoal temps low and produces so much water vapor and tars that the gasifier rig needs a LOT of cleaning.

The condensed liquid from the gasifier output is coal black from soot and consists of water and tars, no alcohol, it won't burn.

One other post I read on the web, from a fellow running his 302 V8 Ford truck on a Mother Earth clone gasifier unit, drains about a half gallon of this black liquid condensate from his gasifier for every 10-12 miles traveled.

10-12 miles of travel likely equate to around 15 pounds of wood in his V8 truck. From reading many web postings, smaller 4-cylinder engines seem to burn around 1 pound/mile, larger engines use something around 1.5 pounds/mile.

There is a current running discussion of wood gasifiers on the "More Renewable Energy" forum HERE

Tim,
Thanks, that was invaluble!!!!

regards,
Tim