My Home-Made Biomass Gasifier

Making your own gasifier is easy

I've built a lot of alternative energy projects over the years. See my homebuilt solar panel and wind turbine pages. I've always wanted to build a
wood or biomass gasifier too. Why? Well, the internal combustion engine is
really an important part of our society and the basis of a lot of our
transportation and portable power technology. It isn't going to be going
away any time soon. I've mastered making my own electricity from the sun
and wind, but that doesn't help my truck go down the road, power the lawn
mower, or run my generator on cloudy, windless days. Those all have
internal combustion engines, and they all need fuel to run. I finally decided
it was time to master making my own fuel. Why pay the Arabs for it if I can
make a working substitute myself?
So what is A biomass gasifier? Basically is a chemical reactor that converts
wood, or other biomass substances, into a combustible gas that can be
burned for heating, cooking, or for running an internal combustion engine.
This is achieved by partially combusting the biomass in the reactor, and
using the heat generated to pyrolyse or thermally break down the rest of
the material into volatile gasses.

A well built reactor will also convert combustion by products like CO2 and
water vapour into flammable CO and H2 by passing them over a bed of hot
charcoal where they will get reduced.

Thus the gasifier converts most of the mass of the wood (or other biomass
feedstock) into flammable gasses with only some ash and unburned
charcoal residue. That is the theory anyway. This is an extreme oversimplification of how the gasifier really works. Wood and other biomass is
made of incredibly complex macro-molecules like Cellulose and Lignin that
break down into hundreds or thousands of different smaller molecules as
the reaction proceeds. There are thousands of different complex chemical
reactions going on inside the reactor. The overall result though, if the
gasifier is working well, is represented in the simple formulas above.
Ideally, the gasifier would break down biomass into nothing but Methane
(and other simple gaseous hydrocarbons), Hydrogen and Carbon

Monoxide. Here in the real world though, things rarely work ideally. The
dirty (literally) little secret about biomass gasification is tar production.
Above I said that the macro-molecules that make up biomass get broken
down into smaller molecules. Some of those smaller molecules are still
pretty big though. If the gasifier is working well, these big breakdown byproducts will be further "cracked" into smaller molecules. If the gasifier isn't
working so well, these big molecules will wind up in the gas being
produced. They will condense out of the gas as a thick, sticky, black, semiliquid that very closely resembles roofing or road tar, but is even stinkier.
Even a well-built gasifier produces a small amount of tar. Most real-world
applications can't handle much, or even any, tar. This story of my struggle
to design and build a working biomass gasifier could actually be accurately
described as a battle to reduce tar production. So below is the most
important of all chemical reactions a novice gasifier builder needs to know.
Biomass + Poorly Designed Gasifier = Tar!
A word of warning
here. This project is
dangerous. Metal
working and
welding are
involved in the
construction, so all
the usual dangers
of laceration, burns
and electrocution
that go along with
them are present.
Use all necessary
precautions. Also,
the operation of a
biomass gasifier
produces lots of
heat, flammable
and poisonous
gasses. Never
operate the gasifier
indoors. The gasses
produced are
flammable and potentially explosive if allowed to accumulate in an
enclosed space, like a building. Also, the Carbon Monoxide the gasifier
produces is lethal! Only operate the gasifier outdoors and try to stay up

wind of the unit when it is running. Treat the gas coming out of the gasifier
with the same respect as you would for the natural gas that you may have
piped into your house. It is just as potentially explosive and deadly.
My original goals with this gasifier project, were to build a compact and
simple gasifier, that used inexpensive feedstock (like wood chips or mulch
that is available very inexpensively, or even free), and produced highquality gas. Little did I know in the beginning that these goals appear to be
largely incompatible? Simple gasifiers don't produce good gas, and
inexpensive fuel is the most difficult to work with. Only after working away
at the project for a while, and going through several major redesigns of the
gasifier and changes of fuels, did I achieve a system that works reasonably
well. So this web site will chronicle the evolution of the gasifier, from early
failure, to ultimate success. I will point out the mistakes I made and blind
alleys I went down, so that you won't have to make those same mistakes.

As I said above, my original goals were to produce high quality gas from a
compact, simple and easy to fabricate design. My research showed that
the downdraft gasifier design generally produced the best quality gas.
However, there are a bewildering number of variations on the downdraft
design. Some quite complex and difficult to fabricate, others much simpler.
So naturally I gravitated toward the simpler designs. I originally aimed for a
simple open core design, like the one on the far left of the bottom row of
the diagram.
I found out through experience that the simple designs just don't seem to
work very well. At least I couldn't get them to work very well. The reason
there are so many complicated designs is that they work so much better.
So I started out building a simple open core design. But by the time I had a
reasonably well working gasifier, the design had morphed into something
that looks a lot more like the complex J-Tube design on the far right of the
middle row. Fortunately I was able to incrementally modify the original
design to get to the final design, and didn't have to completely start over
again.
I chose the open
core stratified
downdraft gasifier
design because it
was by far the
simplest of all the
designs I could find.
Everything I read
about it (at the time)
said it should work
great. I saw vague
references to
people in India
having great
success with this
design. So I thought
I couldn't fail. Turns
out this design
sucks. It is really
good at producing
tar, but not so great
at making high
quality gas.
Unfortunately I had
to build it before I