[Gasification] [Stoves] Producer gas without nitrogen

[Anand Karve]

Dear Stovers and Gasifiers,
just as Tom Reed became nostalgic, I too would like to go back into the
past. I obtained my Ph.D. in 1960 in plant physiology
and conducted research in Botany and agriculture till the 1990s.. In the
early part of the decade of 1990s, my daughter, Dr. Priyadarshini Karve,
introduced me to the subject of biomass based energy. She also obtained a
personal computer at that time, which I too used in my spare time. In this
way I got introduced to the group interested in stoves. In 2003, I
developed the technology of urban biogas plants which used food waste as
feedstock rather than dung. When I started reporting this in seminars and
conferences, the audience used to hoot me out, because the textbooks
said in those days that non-dung substances could be fed into a biogas
plant, but that they had to be co-fermented with dung. People started
believing me only after I received the Ashden Award in 2006 for this
discovery. And now, within just 10 years of my discovery, urban biogas
systems using food waste as the sole feedstock have found worldwide
acceptance.
     Indian agriculture generates annually 800 million tons of waste
biomass. Indian cities generate annually 200 million tons of organic waste.
Taken together, this waste has more than three times as much energy as the
petroleum that India annually imports. Using the old technologies of
biogas, producer gas and coal gas, we can easily stop importing petroleum
altogether. As one of the participants in the discussion on this topic
mentioned, we now have much better materials, catalysts, control systems
etc., so that we can revive these old technologies and make them work more
efficiently. I have been going around, giving lectures on this topic for
the last one year and I thought that this theme would be
enthusiastically taken up by the Indian scientists and engineers, but
whomever I talked to, came up with text book references and gems of
traditional wisdom, showing how it could not be done. I am now an old,
retired scientist, having no access to any modern workshop or laboratory.
So the only thing I can do is to appeal to the youngsteers to take up work
on this theme so that the problems of waste disposal and depleting fossil
fuels can both be simultaneously solved.
Yours
A.D.Karve

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Marc Pare <mpare at gatech.edu> wrote:

> Dear. A.D. Karve,
>
> Careful about compressing producer gas:
>
> From Bear at All Power Labs
> http://gekgasifier.com/forums/index.php/topic/193-gas-storage/
>
>  Energy - If you want to minimize the volume, you'd think of compressing
> it. The energy density becomes an issue again. The energy used by the
> compressor seriously starts to use the potential energy in the gas you're
> compressing.
>
> Reversion - I don't have the specific numbers, but *CO is not stable will
> revert to solid carbon and O2 over time. The rate will increase with
> compression.*
>
> Most importantly:
> Safety - *The produced gas has very high levels of CO. Storing, and
> especially compressing, the gas leads to risks of rapid release of the gas.
> THIS IS NOT SAFE.** *
>
>
> Marc Paré
> B.S. Mechanical Engineering
> Georgia Institute of Technology | Université de Technologie de Compiègne
>
> my cv, etc. | http://notwandering.com
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Friends,
>> thanks for enlightening me about molecular sieves. From the information
>> received from members of the gasification and pyrolysis group, it appears
>> to be within the realm of possibility to produce pyrolysis gas without
>> nitrogen. This opens up the possibility of bottling nitrogen free producer
>> gas and using it as automotive fuel. Even a TLUD stove would burn much
>> better if supplied with primary air without nitrogen.
>> Yours
>> A.D.Karve
>>
>> --
>> ***
>> Dr. A.D. Karve
>> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
***
Dr. A.D. Karve
Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
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