Can A Car Run On Garbage?
Cars can’t run on garbage, not directly at least. To make this work, the garbage has to be processed to generate a combustible gas. The resulted gas is then used to make a car run.
The first time I heard about it was in the series “Back to the Future”. “Mr. Fusion” a home energy generator was fueled by extracting hydrogen atoms from garbage that replaced the “Flus capacitor” because of the lack of plutonium.
Well, it may have been fiction there, but nowadays it can be obtained. Yes, a car that runs on garbage can be done.
What Does Gasification Mean?
As I said earlier, in order to turn garbage into gas we need a gasifier. The transformation process is called gasification. A more technical explanation for gasification is the conversion of nearly any solid dryorganic matter into a flammable fuel. The thermo-chemical process converts coal, petro-coke or biomass into a gas consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Under the proper conditions, it can be a useful energy extracting process, but also it can be a waste stream disposal system.
Did You Know?
Gasoline-starved farmers during WWII used to make their own gas/liquid fuel for their tractors and equipment with a homemade gasifier.
Also you should keep in mind that the process of gasification is different from combustion. Both are exothermic reactions, but with the gasifier there is no fuel burned to produce heat as energy.
The same idea is used for making your car run on biomass. You will need wood chips or walnut shells, agriculture waste to obtain a flexible gaseous foul for the internal combustion engine.
How Does It Work?
An example of a car that runs on garbage is a converted Honda Accord.
In this project it was used a simple gasifier, made as complex as a traditional wood stove. These are easy to reproduce DIY enthusiasts. The goal was to use a simple hammer or tools that can be found at Sears and wrench technology.
First the constructer has to develop the open source Gasifier Experimenter’s Kit as a flexible-fuel biomass processor which will produce a gaseous fuel (syngas). Generators, heaters and motors (anything that could be run on propane) could be powered by the syngas produced by our GEK. This is how the idea came on how to build a concept car powered by our GEK unit.
Because you can’t dump the syngas into the gas tank in order to run the engine as usual – the syngas fuel is not liquid – you have to disable the Honda’s gasoline fuel injectors. Then you will install a modified version of the standard GEK unit in the trunk area that has attached a fuel tube which is hooked to the Honda engine in front.
More hard work than it seems like.
The Honda engine suffers few modifications. You have to disable the fuel injectors, and tee the air intake to allow pulling in our syngas along with the air. This doesn’t affect the engine that much, so it can run on gasoline if needed, with a flip of a switch to re-enable the fuel injectors.
Photo source: Hackedgadgets.com