[Gasification] Regarding Combustion Quality of Producer gas

[Ken Boak]

Greg,

Thanks for the appreciative words.

My fascination for Lister type slow speed engines stems from the fact that
the basic design is now approaching 100 years old, and has survived the
assault of the mass production era.

All of the well known engine manufacturers were producing low hp, slow
speed vertical single designs 100 years ago for agricultural mechanisation,
irrigation etc, but it is incredible that Lister continued to support this
design in the UK until 1984, and it is still manufactured in India.

The Lister engine is easy to work on, and very forgiving, and can be made
to run on virtually any liquid or gaseous fuel.  Whilst only 6 or 8hp, this
is sufficient to run a generator, water pump, agricultural processing
machines etc.

There are many parts of the developing world that would benefit from small
scale mechanisation, in the same way that farms in N. America and Europe
benefited form mechanisation in the early part of the 20th century.

What they need is a simple, rugged engine that is easy to fix and can run
to a certain degree on non petroleum fuels - such as wood gas or biogas.

Most small agricultural processing machines will run off a 6hp engine, and
I am sure that with massive flywheels it is possible to run a wood chipper
or wood fuel processing machines.

In addition to the shaft power, it should not be forgotten that there is
almost twice as much thermal power available, from the cooling jacket and
the hot exhaust.  The engine is an energy conversion machine, and so often
we are fixated with the mechanical output, that the thermal outputs are
often considered waste, of little value and dumped to atmosphere.

The pneumatic pumping power of the exhaust could be used to drive an
ejector, and the waste heat used for drying or pyrolysing biomass.  One
experiment earlier this year involved pyrolysing woodchips directly with
the hot diesel exhaust, producing biochar plus an off-gas that was
sufficiently flammable to support a flare.

The Lister is a wonderful energy conversion tool-kit, just looking for
experimenters to devise new ways to fuel it and exploit the waste products.
 Whilst not the world's most efficient, or low emission engine, it will
turn biomass derived gas into electricity with a conversion efficiency of
slightly better than 20%.  This has immediate and widespread applications
for distributed village scale power.



Ken
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