For farmers, to use the sunflower seed (in oil form) as heat-engine fuel (for tractors, water-pumping, grinding, heat-pump, generate electricity or other shaft-power) just does not make sense. They have the stalk, straw and weed. The intelligent and environment-friendly choice is to use these growing (CO2 neutral) fuel instead of depending on fossile.
There are several choices.
- gasification + Otto engine
- gasification + Ericsson cycle (regenerated or recuperated) gas turbine probably the BEST !
- direct burning + rankine cycle: steam engine or steam turbine or ORC (organic ranking cycle)
- a combination of the above.
More links and images [here] (Hungarian. We will continue in English here)
We built 2 FEMA-type downdraft gasifiers. We will make a 3d with better heat-exchange between the incoming air and the wood-gas output, like in the mature gekgasifier.com
Besides Otto engine and trivial applications, we plan to use the wood-gas in radial-compressor gas turbines and MembersPage/MarcellGal/DetonationCycleGasTurbine
Use the VEMS Round to control the clean air feed "throttle" of a gasifier in order to improve the output
- vacuum accumulator
- PWM valve
- pneumatic solenoid valve
- vacuum actuator
- Marcell found several in the junkyard. eg BMW had near the manifold in several 6 cyl engines around 1990.
- most cars have flaps in the cabin-heating / air conditioning system actuated by vacuum valves
- audi (and other VW consortium) vehicles have pneumatic door-lock. These do not seem good, because designed for on/off operation
What solenoid do they use to control the throttle ? The direction would be important (too low lambda => higher or lower PWM duty needed)
Stepper would be nice. Unfortunately round does not have enough outputs to control 4 wire stepper.
We have a v3 with blue LCD inside - to be mounted on a standalone 1.6L 4 cyl engine. The LCD equipped genboard v3 looks very cool