Turning Grass into Gasoline: Green Fuel Revolution
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2021
- Is corn the only crop that can be made into fuel? In our new series with Andy from @htme, we’re exploring how to make gasoline from grass clippings to power small engines.
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I know of a self moving bioreactor that automatically mows your lawn, ferments the gras, is powered by the grass, fertilizes it and if you let it, even self replicates. It's a cow. Or a goat. Or a sheep.
Also drops a huge amount of chocolate
@@charon3707 from what I hear, the chocolate tastes like S***
@@Tibbs_Farm can confirm, at least a friend said anyway
sheep! they don't eat the grass to the roots, you get fertiliser, wool and maybe milk. it's perfect
feeds you for a year protecting against inflation prices if you freeze and butcher it. you will also appreciate an animal died to feed you.
It is something weirdly beautiful about the grass powering it's own destruction
You do the same when paying taxes WW3 doesn't happen without governments.
@@Barskor1and they call us the superior species.😂😂😂😂😂
That's how taxes work... and fiat money to a large extent. Just extraction and redistribution of capital, privatizing profits, socializing losses. Wash, rinse, repeat.
*its own haircuts. mowing is grooming.
@@kingmasterlordhow does the grass benefit from being groomed? maybe there's an argument about keeping the fast-growing grass from stealing sunlight from the slow grass? but then we just get into the same taxation-is-theft argument from the beginning of this thread
My uncle had a silo on his farm. He used to fill it full of silage, to feed his cows in the winter. If he got some moisture in it the silage would ferment. It was pretty funny to see a field full of drunk cows.
So, the acid isnt needed, take your green grass and ram it into a barrel. It'll ferment on its own from naturally occurring yeast. If you'd like run some copper tubing through the barrel for hot water. Keep the barrel outside in case it gets a little too hot, it can self combust.
Yep, that sounds a pretty good, low cost solution to getting alcohol and the cows will like your uncle too!
One word: time
Its air that spoils silage, not moisture, it's bagged wet and pickles, holes let air in and it changes from anaerobic
For the most part yeah!
Minor snobby aspect would be controlling *what* fermentation happens could be an issue. Best case scenario some delicious silage (Lactic Acid Fermentation, same used for Sauerkraut, Yoghurt, Kimchi, etc) , worst case scenario that psychodelic one (then some WILD cow shenanigans) or just *botulism*.
Anaerobic Digestion *can* make Biogas (Basically Dirty Methane; Pure Methane is LNG/Rocket Fuel, "Natural Gas" is surprisingly "dirty" at pipeline grade, albeit not as bad as raw biogas) with the right stuff which is a bit simpler than Cellulosic Ethanol, and *way more* than Bio-Butanol, or proper "Bio-Gasoline" (Although you could turn bio-methane into Gasoline etc with "Gas to Liquids" technology). This is so simple you can do it with a bucket and some pvc pipe!
Those "anaerobic digestors" are used on some giant Dairy Farms to manage all the manure (At some Wastewater Treatment Plants for the Sludge / "Human Bio-Solids" / Humanure / AKA "POOP" ) and make useful products. Neat thing though is they are so simple they are a great solution for low income countries. Decent amount of coverage of their usage in India online for anyone interested.
That's my rant on all this at least!
I don’t think he wanted to wait 6 months but good idea all the same 👍🏻
Your running the lawn mower with out the Air Shroud on it. The air shroud directs the air that the fins on the flywheel pushes across the head of the engine to cool it. It most likely overheated at the end of your mowing. It's a briggs air cooled engine and requires the shroud to cool it.
He paid way too much to have the engine "converted" to run on alcohol, any gasoline engine will run happily on alcohol that's at least 75% in concentration, and it is a Tecumseh, not a Briggs & Stratton, you can tell by the placement of the muffler, and the shape of the air shroud.
Thank u I was coming to say the same thing
@@davekauffman8727Actually, that's a Briggs Quantum. The carburetor and thus the intake is on the opposite side of the muffler. Tecumseh engines have the carburetor on the same side as the muffler and early Honda engines had that too. Also, $250.00 for a conversion like that and on a flathead to boot is too expensive, all he had to do was change the orifice size of the jet(s). I would have also chosen an old OHV/OHC engine as they burn far more efficiently than older flatheads. I guess another option is finding an engine that can be easily converted to electronic fuel injection but those are hard to find in a small walk behind mower.
He didn't want to get suicided stfu bro you're gonna get u gon get him killed
Just running on gas with no liquid fuel is what cause the overheating.
Here in Brazil we mass produce Bioethanol with the organic material left from harvests, mostly from sugar cane, which has tons of sugar. Basically you press the sugar canes and take the juice out, the material left is still moist and can be used to make Ethanol. Its a good way to make use of stuff that would go to the trash.
So you take what would otherwise be discarded simple sugars?
What happens to the remaining cellulose pulp? I'm thinking the remaining cellulose pulp could be processed into paper.
@@midgetman4206 Sorry, only now i have seen your comment. Yes, i understand little of the chemical process, but i think that those leftover materials would go to waste otherwise.
The dried pulp usually is used to fuel distilers, or feed to livestock. You can make alcohol from that, but the fermentation has to be done in the same way as the video. Using sulfuric acid to process tons of pulp would make the whole ordeal very expensive, compared to simply fermenting the sugary juice from the canes, hence, it's rarelly done.
@@jacobshort6528 the remaining cellulose is burnt in steam generators. Generating far more electricity the plant needs to operate. The exces is sold to the grid. Here in São Paulo, almost 20% of all electric consumption comes from ethanol production.
Dude, convert the lawn mower to a steam engine, turn the grass into pellets and burn them to power the mower. Will be cheaper than making ethanol and you dont need to handle chemicals. The downside you will create a lot of smoke, but hanging some meat on the exhaust will smoke it for free
@@alzoz6741 I ran on wood gas for many years. Great way to get energy cheap!
😂😂 Best comment I've read in a while. 😂😂
Handling chemicals is fun tho
the BTU conversion rate for steam and internal combustion engines are insanely off balanced, you lose so many BTU's in a steam engine that an ICE engine would utilize. while yes you can convert it to steam it is more efficient and convenient to convert the biomass to fuel first
Lmao
If I may make a small suggestion: When distilling alcohol the lid of the fermenter should be dome shaped so as to direct the water/alcohol vapour to rise into the neck of the device. Otherwise most of the alcohol will condense on the flat underside of the lid. I also noted that when you performed the "flash" test by igniting the distilled alcohol, the flame was yellow. That indicates that the alcohol you distilled contained a significant proportion of methanol (CH3OH).
I was thinking it would have been both easy and a good idea to try to get methanol instead! all you have to do is basically put it in a container (usually called a methane digester) with some microorganisms, like what you find in manure. no need for any strong acids you have to buy from the store even.
Experienced huh?? Tehehe
here in Brazil we started the alcohol production program on sugarcane in the 1970's, here the liter of alcohol is about 75% of a liter of gasoline and about 80% of the engine performance. Well, Its a green fuel but not a great deal in terms of economy. To your project I would recommend another approach, no acid, no shredding, just dry the grass and burn it in a boiler connecting it with a steam engine to make electricity and use an eletrical lownmower. It is possible that you would have a most cost-effective result.
Thank you for your video
There’s also the possibility of dry distilling the grass into syngas (wood gas), then using the gas feedstock with Fischer-Tropsch to produce actual gasoline, consisting of medium molecular weight alkanes (paraffins), alkenes (olefins) and cycloalkanes (napthenes). So from pentane to tridecane, and as light as propane and even methane if necessary.
Im just wondering why direct thermal decomposition wasn't the first choice. All you would have to do is heat the grass above its ignition point in a oxygen free environment and direct offgas to the carburetor. Because....uhm....if the goal is to make something run off grass it shouldnt require gallons of acid and bases.
Or you could just burn the syngas.
@@calvingreene90 if i remember correctly, syngas is typically heavy in tars and other byproducts, so it would be rough on your engine without some processing. processing the gas into things like gasoline lets us use the output in our current systems with very little tweaking, which makes it scalable into our current uses.
@@miclowgunman1987
Filter and compress. Bubbled through water and a little time in a gassometer will do.
I live off grid and I have 8.5kw of solar panels. I am working on pyrolysis using my excess solar. I'm storing the Syngas in a gasometer.
Coming from a moonshiner family some of this was painful to watch but it was entertaining.
I guess we could say his process of making grassoline is pretty entertaining. ツ Do you use ethanol as fuel yourself?
@@thatguyalex2835 saves money
I was thinking he needed to go talk to an old shine runner lol
So the title should have been Turning Grass into Ethanol: Green Fuel Revolution. I was fooled!
If it was methanol there was a possibility of creating patrol
Thirty years ago I was reading about making fuel from newspapers. It was pretty much the same process of using acid to break down the cellulose. I thought newspaper would be a cheap source of yeast food but after researching the process I decided to go with potatoes.
The perfect liquor for the discerning suburban dad.
Fahkn Ell. 😆
Yeah, blindness and death are just part of the fun.
@@308dad8 stop drinking paint thinner then
@@Blox117Post Mellinial huh? It shows
@@308dad8 im not, but i imagine even they know how to spell millennial
The engine didn't have the top cover on which directs the cooling air from the flywheel fan over the engine. It over heated is likely why you had trouble...
Smart
That's my thought too, plus that the bubbler carburator gives no control over the fuel air ratio.
ethanol also burns hotter than gasoline in an engine.
@@CRneu No! Actually there's a reason many high-powered racing engines run on pure alcohol. It combusts at a lower temperature, keeping the engine cooler.
@@jp400motox but they spray water into the engine with ethanol to remove heat
I used to deliver in bulk to those ethanol plants was urea. Dry bulk fertilizer. Thats what they used. They mixed it slowly with very hot water and then they mixed it with the corn. They byproduct was then taken to farmers for feed.
his wife contacting curiosity stream to give him this challenge, was just her most efficient way to get him to mow the lawn
If I was going to try this I would go for a peletizer to compress the gas into fuel pellets and then use that directly in a wood gasifier system. This method would give you a much higher energy density for less money and would be versatile with any woody material such as leaves or paper.
not that easy to make a small gasifier for a lawnmower... have seen one man doing this on yt, but it finished with a carburetor full of tar
@@foxtizzo
I'm not sure if the OP meant to mount the whole gasifier on the mower. You could build a large one and use a gas compressor to tank it up for later use on the mower.
Under the "what if there was no more fuel" situation, that's how I'd want to do it so I kept waste down and could give/sell the results to others around town who need it.
@@tin2001 Yeah, that's a way, but you need to go to very high pressures with woodgas to have an energy density that is sufficient to cut grass for let's say for 30 min. I'm doing testings with compressed woodgas right now. The normal 13kg butane tanks under 10 bar would run my generator for 2 minutes. That means 100bar would be sufficient to work 20minuts. For cooking it lasts a bit longer.
@@foxtizzo You dont need high pressure. You can run a generator on woodgas without storage.
To ferment grass it needs to be wet and stay wet and then shut the lid on the barrel. Keep mixing every 12 hours for two days, repeat the process to concentrate it before you add yeast. It'll need a storage tank to capture the resulting gases. Use direct light preferably sunlight or lighting and a heat pad. -Brian Morris
I like the way you do these experiments. It's very professional.
This was awesome to listen to and understand the concept and cost
It reminds me of the NileRed video about making alcohol with toilet paper
Seems like it would have been a good idea to consult with him, considering he's done basically this exact project
Except NileRed FILTERED HIS SOLUTIONS T_T
@@MrWisski What’s up with this? Lol. I’ve seen them filter before
nilered is the only chemist i can trust. 😅
what i love about you guys is that yall dont just sit around and wonder, yall go and see if it can be done.
And this is why the ethanol seen sold at stations is usually E85 with the 15% gasoline for the purpose of denature it and a little bit of lubrication.
I would have tried a ball mill to process the grass.
You can use a pile of river stones in a barrel tumbler to do this.
The up front labor should be much less. It's just a matter of time, after that.
Great video. I learned that cellulose can be fermented... didn't know that.
I learned that straight ethanol can run an ICE... if you use that bubbler thingy.
Thanks HTME!!
As soon as I heard sulfuric acid, I knew this wasn't a very cost effective process 🙄 sulfuric acid is pretty expensive but handy to have, there is a way to synthesize it from raw sulfur and other ingredients but it looks like a lengthy process too. All together cool content though 👍💯😎
You should check out 'Caveman Chemistry'. It goes over the exploits of Spot and Roebuck in England when they each invented the same process for sulfuric acid production at around the same time. Very interesting read.
Vinegar is much cheaper however it may need to soak the must much longer.
$30 a gallon mower gas😂
What about silage to get acidity "naturally"
you can make it in great amounts with elektrolysis
There are 3 ways I can think of off the top of my head.
1)converting plant/seed starches into sugar and then alcohol
2)collect the plant oils using distillation, then add sodium hydroxide and separate the bio-diesel
3)burn it normally and collect the smoke as a wood gas alternative.
#3 - Why not just heat it in the steel drum with a tiny bit of propane and make flammable "WOOD GAS" out of the raw cut grass? No need to mulch. Much cheaper and you get instant results. The other plus with WOOD-GAS is that you get 95% of your fuel out of the organic material and its DIRT CHEAP to do! Just need a 55 Gallon open head steel drum with lid and ring clamp and the base for a Turkey deep fryer to get the grass smoldering. You also need an air inlet valve in the bottom of the drum to get the air fuel ratio correct. I also use a 5 gallon bucket of water and use manifold vacuum to clean the soot out of the syn-gas Grass-smoke. It has a lot of BANG for the buck and is dirt cheap to make.
There once was a movie about a man that turned into a dog that made some veichles run on grass. At the end the dog said "Oh no I'm out of grass"
Thanks for the video.
Curious if you’ve seen videos on people turning plastic bottle trash into diesel and gasoline. Sounds like it would be right up your alley 👍🏼
Good illustration of how expensive, comparatively speaking, is the ethanol production... Probably we should consider using wood gazifiers to power a gas engine, or better going back to small steam or Stirling engines to power our stuff, as those classic technologies use a direct forward energy production method...
Stirling and steam engines use external combustion or heat source. Gasoline engine has internal combustion. Quite big difference in operation.
Just out of my own curiousity; did you try blending the grass while the grass was wet/soaked?
Ever mowed a wet lawn? The same would happen to your grinder or, if it goes fast enough, will heat up quite fast (not the motor, the bucket where it rotates in)...I burned my hands a few times this way
@@Hunne2303Ever make a smoothie? It depends on the amount of water.
The reason corn isn't efficient is because it takes fuel to run the farm equipment, and fertilizer and pesticides to grow the corn. Now I could be wrong, but I think if we tried sugar beets instead of corn, we would need less of all of those. Planting and harvesting would be easier, and since it isn't being grown for consumption, it wouldn't need fertilizers and pesticides, so that would be more cost effective. Maybe they have thought of this already, and there is something I'm not thinking of, but I trhink it's worth considering.
It's really good for us that someone is trying. I cannot help but applaud. These are the things we need to learn and test as a world. But what worries me is that all plants need nutrients, and the energy to spread nutrients into the grounds are not free and in many places will strip in a few seasons. The grasslands of the US were tended by Bison, which carried nutrients from valley to highland, and highland to valley, creating a cycle of life from dung to insect to bird to dung to molds to grass to bison to dung, with the cost to humans being a requirement to stand aside when a herd of 10,000 Bison decided to move, and to watch where you stepped. Cattle can, to some degree, replicate this, if we increase the numbers.
Try to use the grass clippings in a wood gasification system next!
this would make more sense since the grass can go in with little to no modification, although making grass pellet's would probably be beneficial
has been done and the tar residue glogs up the valves, killing the engiine
gasification is a dirty method
@@lIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlI it is at least more efficient than doing the etanol thing.
valves can be cleaned, the question is how often do you need to clean it, every 3 times you mow the lawn?
@@lIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlI What is a fuel filter?
This is so interesting to watch. There's a guy called Mr Teslonian on UA-cam who extract oil and gasoline from burning wood. He also made a car running on firewood. His work is very interesting and he's like a DIY off grid person. He seems very smart, way above my head. But I would love to learn more about naturally producing fuel. For example biogas is fairly easy to extract from a compost. The bacterias in the compost that are breaking down the food are farting after they eat. They fart biogas which has energy in it and can be burned or used to fuel a lot of stuff!
I saw a setup that used the grass through a gasifier that used exhaust heat to pyrolyze the grass. It did add considerable weight to the mower.
You need heat when trying to get the yeast to work, very cool btw. the conversion tip about removing the fuel components was gold info. The amount spent to cut your grass - 3 grand.
"Why is this dude mowing his grass AGAIN!?"
--Your neighbors 😆
If you needed about 20% more fuel to air, couldn't you have just run the engine partially choked?
The mower had no manual choke, and taping the intake wouldn't be an option as you have to adjust as the engine comes up to temp, and needs more fuel and air to have the power to actually cut grass.
You can run a higher elevation jet I. The carb.
Thanks for teaching us how to distill everclear from our lawn mowers.
To stretch your source material a bit further, you can add in some malted grain or synthetic Amylase OR do a primary ferment with Koji mold to break the mid-sized starches into simple sugars that the yeast can ferment.
You can also spike your secondary ferment with Klebsiella bacteria (if you can find them). They can metabolize some of the more complex sugars that the yeast cannot. (NOTE: Be careful not to ingest these bacteria or you could develop Autobrewery syndrome, resulting in the need for a completely carb-free diet to prevent constant intoxication and liver disease.)
Another option is to pyrolize your grasses and run the "wood gas" through a simple condenser to capture the tar then bubble it through cold water to extract the methanol. You can even capture and compress the wood gas at the end of the system as an alternative fuel for stoves, grills and gas lamps. Allowing your grass to completely cool before cracking open the vessel will also allow you to collect charcoal powder for use as a pigment or ingredient in black-powder.
You can usually get jet kits for those carburetors. Thats probably a better way to manage the mix. Just make sure you use ethenol rated fuel lines, And maybe a metal tank if you wanted to go that route.
HD-PE tank instead os metal maybe?
Will also be interesting to compare cylinder temps during combustion of actual petrol vs ethanol. Also carbon residue %. Thinking here about eventual burned pistons and carbon build up on valves?
Honestly, you probably cant.
Thats a newer mower. Unfortunately, it has become common practice to make the carbs "non adjustable non servicable"
The jets are often epoxied in place, there are metal seals blocking off screw and jet holes, and some of the carbs are just straight up plastic now.....
That being said, just get a mikuni VM22 & a minibike intake manifold.
Water vapor in that ratio of fuel in the enginge is usually not a problem for the enginge. Water in liquid form sure is a problem for say fuel lines, tank, carburator etc. But the vapor in the pistons dont condense at all and usually just removes inpurities. There is quite extensive testing on running a enginge on ethanol and it seems to decrease the wear and tear compared to petrol.
there is a such thing as water injection after all. i believe it has a cooling effect as well.
it's amazing you found a mechanic that can convert a mower from gasoline to ethanol just like that 10:21
"I'm going to use everything for average consumers."
Proceeds to bust out an Entire chemistry set ....
Grams per liter, pounds, again grams, then gallons... parkour !!! Making my head spin
Lol...$3K per gallon makes my head spin. I’d rather cut the lawn with a manual hedge trimmer... Lowe’s, $19.99.
Have you tried Cellulase or Amylase enzyme instead of acid for the sugar extraction?
You should try an ABE fermentation, it produces acetone, butanol, and ethanol. Butanol is essentially a drop-in replacement for gasoline, no modification needed at all.
Very interesting. How did you solve the lubricant issues with the lawn mower. Most combustion engines that small are two stroke motors that do not have an oil pan. They are lubricated by motor oil that is mixed in with the gasoline. Without lubrication the motor will seize up
Probably what happened. They thing was quite literally running on fumes. No way to inject oil with the gas
@@pseudomemes5267 He should hire a different mechanic the next time. But of course, the experiment was more about the viability of the fuel production process than anything else. Anyway, I would have suggested going for the biogas route, myself, because you can just leave that to bacteria and time. Put all of your bio waste in a container, and you will have a lot of free heat on top of the combustable methane gas.
um i think this is a 4 stroke engine not 2 stroke
Briggs and stratons are 4 strokes my man.. Almost all mowers are. Now High reving machines like chainsaws, weed eaters etc. Are 2 stroke and you're correct they need oil mixed
If that thing was a 2 stroke it would have siezed up before it ever started!
13:11 perfect laboratory smell test 💯
Love the concept, grass is certainly a net waste in my community and we are even warned in the summer not to leave them exposed to the sun because they ferment and may catch on fire.
I don't know how much the sulfuric acid is sustainable (I mean it is an industrial waste and a readily available byproduct of volcanism...)
Overall great job!!
Clearly I prefer using a net waste (grass) rather than a crop to make fuel :)
i think it can be fermented if you're patient, for example people make bokashi as an alternative to compost and it involves using grass and other organic matter, and it makes a sour liquid
i imagine you can distill the bokashi liquid and get some ethanol out of it
Sulphuric acid is a byproduct of mining sulfide metals like copper. Copper mines have lakes of sulphuric acid.
Seems easy, straightforward, looks simple & convenient enough, and definitely likely to go mainstream come lawn season 2024.
Pulverizing with metal balls moved around with magnets seems like it'd reduce size faster & more effectively.
Using a concrete mixer bit for blending/mixing.
Using a grass-type that has a much higher sugar / energy density .. switchgrass, for example.
Or switching methodology & approach altogether opting to pyrolytically gasify the feedstock biomass then cleaning up the hydrogen-rich syngas to fuel ⛽️ a slightly modified generator. Generator provides electricity. Charges mower & weedeater batteries. Quieter
Gotta scale it up to be efficient. I distilled hand sanitizer for its alcohol during covid because supply shortages. It was my first home built still. It was about 1 ½ to 2 cups of brewing volume . Took forever just to get to one cup -ish of product.
The shroud he took off the engine was to help with cooling to duct the air form the fan into the fins on the air cooled engine it probably overheated yes running on alcohol would make it run cooler but I think it would still need cooling and it had basically none
I've seen several engines ruined this way.
You got me thinking though. How about just making alcohol from the natural fermentation of grass? Maybe not as high of a yield but your cost would be next to nothing to make it. Yeast naturally occurs in the air and would start the fermentation in a few days on its own.
Still have to get a fuel permit to distill that alcohol out. Also if you have free space in your freezer you can remove water using freeze concentration.
@@308dad8 In most states its legal to distill alcohol
@@308dad8 you think im gonna ask for a fucking permit? Fuck biden and his gas prices.
@@treyt6474 in any amount?
@@Hunne2303 Yeah
Cool project. THANX
Mate, this must be the most cost inefficient way to mow your lawn. It's almost surrealist.
I learned a lot tho', many thanks for sharing!
I love how he says someone qualified and takes it to the mechanically inclined kid next door haha!
This was a very interesting video, thanks for putting it together!
I've never done this process before or tried to ferment essentially processed grass, so grain of salt, but I was a little surprised you only allowed 48 hours of fermentation. Next time, I would suggest using a hydrometer and fermenting until gravity of 1.000 or less. A hydrometer because you wouldn't need to adjust the refractometer reading for the inaccuracy the presence of ethanol can cause.
nah, 48 hours is enough me thinks...given the low content of sugar, the yeast will finish quickly and kill itself off or starve. I produce with pure sugarwater and baking yeast and that usually takes around 3-4 days...
@@Hunne2303just actual sugar water? This is honestly so interesting.
This is super cool I bet if you were willing to put in the effort to make the sulphuric acid yourself and using wood ash to neutralize if you have a consistent source you could probably make this a lot cheaper. Sulphuric acid as far as I know is not to difficult to make but you’ll need to take precautions and have some laboratory equipment to do so. Basically my understanding is just burn sulphuric and bubble the gas produced through water then distill it to the desired purity and boom sulphuric acid. Sulfur is pretty cheap from garden stores so that might be a better source. And you could probably make several gallons from a bag of it.
Anyway love this idea and the fact that you could use grass clipping to power your mower to cut more grass is pretty awesome.
here in brazil people who want to make more power with their cars use ethanol bc is harder to ignite so you can use more compression ratio on the cilynder or more boost when using forced induction and the ethanol molecule have an oxigen atom so the combustion is wayyy more eficient, the fuel injection has to adapted to inject 30% more fuel, an camaro ss with 450 hp can go up to 550 hp just by changing the fuel and tuning
This is hard work. If the economy crashes, I'll stick to my bicycle.
bikes depend on rubber from asia...
Would turning the grass into silage make the process more efficient?
this would eliminate a great deal of his labor, the need for acid, and if done in a bright enough place the distillate could be captured as it formed with the heat from the sun. real shame you didn't make this video instead.
@@austinpage4361 damn
You forgot to add in the cost of the engine you destroyed by overheating it, because you left the blower housing off.
Awesome job! Thanks 🙏
You can break down the grass easier with a grind wheel. There are easy ways to make effective grinders. You really just need a rough surface to pull the grass across another rough surface. If you let the grass sit in just plain water for about a day, it will make it softer with the water weight in the plant cells. As you draw the grass across, it will squeeze out green water and soften the grass further, after a pass, mix with wster again and grind. The green water can be evaporated and give you some very fine powder. The rest can be dried and crushed again if necessary, but should be broken enough for fermentation. The whole process from clipping to powder could be done in 2 stress free days. A good place to start looking for grinder ideas is to take a rolling pin and try it on grass over concrete. The grass will get lost on your concrete and stsin it green for a while, but it will give your mind a chance to consider the concept physically.
hammer mill would be the fastest way i think.
It sounds like he should inquire as to how matcha tea is made.
Matcha tea smells like lawn clippings and looks like green flour.
I'd like to see side by side about how long you could run an equivalent mower converted to hydrogen power, since you could probably make a good bit of that from the acid used as well.
I have two mowers that run on Hydrogen Fuel From Electrodes. it cheap and fun to make the neighbors look at me like I'm Crazy!
I think you need to add a another step prior to hydrolysis
to break up the lignin with an alkaline solution.
The Cellulose is naturally bound by hemicellulose and protected by lignin. This lignin-binding compound causes lignocellulosic materials to be difficult for hydrolysis alone to break down
90 mins soaking in a wood ash or other alkaline solution should do it. Then wash with water prior to hydrolysis
Nile Red has converted toilet paper to ethanol, using, as I recall, acid hydrolysis. You might chat with him about yields. Also, something that I did when I made ethanol from sugar was to pitch a couple of cans of tomato paste into the mix to provide more nutrients for the yeast....
Well, most won't see this as a low budget way BUT you are proving that gas isn't just made just from Dinoseurs as many people think. This is a great way to show that crude oil is made much from plants and algae, not all from animal remains. GOOD job. Hopefully people will learn that biofuels and dead plant matter can contribute to the making of oil and gas. GOOD job! Try composting some grass or other plants and see if that works any better.
Dry ice should hopefully speed up the shredding process. Freeze the clippings and they should break up faster
YEs.... But how much energy would you need to produce it .... ^^ ?
In Brazil you can buy alcohol at the petrol station as they produce alcohol running cars from factory, the carburettor also have a special coating to avoid corrotion and get ruined
For atomisation of gras you could try to use drill with mixer to concrete. Youd need to sharpen it and maybe reshape a little.
I've watched Tech Ingredients from YT make alcohol from bananas. He used some sort of enzyme to properly dissolve the cellulose, going from memory it was something similar to a MAOI, I think. The best way to know for sure is to watch the way he did it!
I'd be super interested in seeing an engine run on wood gas or even water through sonoluminescence!
Look up woodgas-powered vehicles on the UA-cam. There is a history of them, from WW2 onwards.
Sugar, water and yeast and tomato paste to feed the yeast.
an MAOI is totally different from the enzyme you refer which is called cellulase, allthough if you used an MAOI(mono aminoxidase inhibitor which isn´t an enzyme but blocks the enzyme called mono amineoxidase) you could die eating a banana. another way would be using pyrolysis which could be powered by the sun
An idea for turning the grass clippings into a finer powder,
Seal them into a concrete mixer and toss in some rocks
That's is freaking awsome! It's total possable to make your own fule.
Two points of interest: Cow manure generates lots of Methane. Another way to produce fuel from organic matter is pyrolysis - You can heat the organic matter in the absence of oxygen. What you get is tar, which is more akin to crude oil. You can then process it to make high quality gasoline. One easy way of heating organic matter without adding more energy to the system is to use solar heat.
I think the easier thing to do would have been to compress the clippings into pucks or pellets and used in a wood gasifyer to run a generator to charge batteries for an electric lawnmower.
But, that's not as fun lol. Also I get that the point is to teach about alternative storable fuel sources.
the pellets would probably fall apart because of the heat/moisture coming out, it's the reason most gasifiers use wood chunks.
Bake the grass clippings in trays inside a dehydrator oven, then hydraulically compress them into either pellets or pucks.
Just charge the batteries with a solar panel.
just use the generator on the lawnmower instead???
An alternative method would be to use a different organism strain than yeast to digest the cellulose directly without needing to break it down first with acid reduction. However that may produce results over months rather than weeks. But it could potentially be a lot cheaper if the process was somewhat self-sustaining.
I would suggest using a digester take 155 gallon drums step the full of grass fill it with water and add either a bucket full manure or box of red x after about 24 hours you should start noticing a bubbling cap the barrel how much the second barrel filled with water run the pipe down into the water and let it bubble up through the water use your second bung on your thing to run a piece of pipe out with the valve on it I believe you'll find that when you bring a flame next to the pipe and open the valve you'll have fire you are now producing methane gas it does running internal combustion engines.
What about putting it in a giant tumbler like what is used to polish stones that might make a finer powder.
Or use a hydraulic press and mold of some kind to press it into more solid bricks then grate/grind/sand them down?
Corn based ethanol produces cattle/poultry/swine feed. It also produces corn oil for cooking/lubrication/biodiesel. Certainly nothing wrong about discussing pros and cons of the industry but let’s make sure we are discussing all the details. What I’m most interested in is ethanol as a heat source for interior spaces. It burns so clean that it’s exhaust doesn’t next be vented. This allows for all of the heat to remain in the space.
Hey, nice, 2 HTME videos in one day!
i used the grass to destroy the grass
If that engine backfires and lights up your Mason jar carburetor you're going to end up with a fireball and glass shrapnel inside you.
Making videos like this is how you go missing
Reminds me of a book by David Blume called Alcohol can be a Gas! Super interesting book showing how much alcohol you can get from many crops w/ alcohol yield per ton and per acre. If I remember correctly it shows some waste products that could be converted into alcohol as well. One guy who grew watermelon for seeds started using the pulp to make alcohol 🤔
Couldn't u just use moonshine? 😂 white lightening will knock u down its like 100 or 200 proof. 😂 if that won't cut your grass, idk what will
@@daviedood2503 I think for use in anything that compresses fuel you'd want it to be nearly anhydrous ethanol. 200 proof comes close, which may be suitable BUT 200 proof can still be drank (at least according to my friends). The ethanol at the pump is so pure and full of different types of alcohol group chemicals it'd kill you, even at very small concentrations. (Not to mention the 15 percent isooctane gasoline). Pure anhydrous ethanol will have zero to no water but will also contain some amounts of other primary (like methanol, which is toxic) and secondary alcohols, and/or other alcohol isomers like isopropyl alcohol, which is also very toxic. I'm sure there are also sugar alcohols present, amongst a litany of other related compounds, but the main component is ethanol or "pure grain alcohol." Still not something you can drink. Hopefully we'll become smarter in the future and start using biomass for biofuels. I've always wondered why someone hasn't tapped into this.
@@scenicdepictionsofchicagolife naw, it's how it burns. The explosion in the motor and the engine compression etc. It's how combustible it is to slam the piston down inside the chamber.
200 proof like everlcear they run race cars on it just for laughs. Actually does quite well but very expensive to do. Especially high performance engines etc. Biofuels etc has to do with disel engines. They not fuel injected exactly so the combustion is a little different on how it happens.
@@scenicdepictionsofchicagolife Because "they" have killed all of inventors. Somr dude comes up with a great idea and you wont here from that guy anymore....
I really enjoy these kinds of videos. They are very instructive about what a hoax green energy is.
I wouldn't call it a hoax but it is certainly not a simple as environmentalists make it out to be, and ignorance tends to cause more problems then are solved. But yes I get what you're saying, to make green power cost effective is a major engineering challenge that takes a lot more than just a change of mindset , that would just be denial and unrealistic.
For instance shutting down the nuclear reactors while forcing people to get electric cars... Ruining forest by making green fuel out of trees. Biodegradable plastics releasing more carcinogens into the environment then regular plastic would have.
So much that it's not thought out and mostly impulsive irritates me to no end.
But I do know that the 'green revolution' MUST come because what has been going on the last 300 years has been destructive, short sighted and wasteful, getting worse every year and it's now passed a tipping point, change should have happened before the tipping point.
@@petevenuti7355 *impoverishes you to no end
This particular one. Wind, solar and electric good and cheap
Here in the UK, Ecotricity, a renewable electricity generator and supplier is setting up a commercial scale plant to produce methane from grass. The intention is to feed it into the UK gas grid.
That guy knows his way around mowers.
Can we please call it "grassoline"?
He did in the beginning
Grassohol would be more accurate lol
@@professorvaudevillain Yes, but that sounds too much like "grasshole", etcetera.
Dude, at *0:46* in the video, he did.
No . 😂
Who else is here because of fuel prices ?
Made sense a while ago, now I'm here because I like having useful knowledge for a SHTF scenario
Yep... That and knowledge
The best way to break up dry grasses for this is with a ball mill. If you have fresh grass, you can add in a bit of water and use an immersion blender, adding just enough water to keep it moving. You can then either let it evaporate or calculate the dilution (in moles) of your acid and adjust accordingly.
That was a great video. It would be interesting to see you create a gasifier and see if that would be functional and the cost of that cheers!!
Oh hell yeah, hi Adri!
Came to the comments for this XD
Why not experiment with different types of grass? I find these videos interesting! Keep up the great work!
good idea, more flavours
To chop the grass finer,don't dry the grass before you blend it. In fact, add some water when blending.
I looked into this year's ago with enzymes. Iirc Corn produces 600 gallons per acre, sugarcane produces 3600 gallons per acre. Do the math that's almost 10 gal per day you can burn. Switchgrass was 400 I think. I remember mix 1lb material with 20lbs water & enzymes. Then it needed a reflux still, not sure what's particular about that type but the guide said had to use that kind. Then add zeolite to remove the water content. Gasoline stoich is 14.7:1 & ethanol is 9.6:1 air fuel ratio. The other issue mechanically is alcohol has a much higher octane so it needs more spark advance to actually see benefit. Alcohol in a gas tuned engine runs worse than with gas. But that same engine tuned for alcohol runs way better & makes more torque therfore needing less rpm/ throttle therfore burning less fuel per job than gasoline. Any rubber components need to be synthetic to avoid alcohol eating it apart, & alcohol is corrosive to aluminum. Alot of tuning street cars is done on e85 now when it's available so we can make more power, & they have alot of info
The idea that components such as fuel lines, seals, and aluminum parts need to be replaced to support ethanol fuel is mostly obsolete. So-called rubber components in modern engines, even small engines, are made of things like neoprene or tygon specifically because they can hold up to both gasoline and ethanol. It's also not really true that ethanol corrodes aluminum. It will only corrode aluminum if stored improperly such that it adsorbs water and forms an acidic solution. As long as the ethanol isn't left to acidify, there should be no problem with exposing aluminum parts to it. It's also not necessarily true that less fuel is burned per job with ethanol; ethanol contains less available energy per volume, but as you said, it is more compressible, so it's a better performing fuel. Not so much for lawn mowing since lawn mowing doesn't require that much power (in contrast to say driving a truck up a steep hill). However, ethanol burns cooler than gasoline, so it's still a more efficient fuel. For the record, I have experience converting both small and large engines to run on ethanol. It doesn't really take that much to tune any kind of gasoline engine to run correctly on ethanol, but high performance vehicles require the advanced tuning approaches in order to take full advantage of what ethanol has to offer in terms of power. Usually timing adjustments aren't required for an engine to run adequately, whether it's 2 stroke or 4 stroke, and EFI vehicles adjust timing automatically. At the very basic, conversion comes down to making sure enough fuel makes it into the cylinder before ignition. When youtubers make videos about ethanol fuel and their engine breaks down, it's almost always because they are failing to provide the correct air-fuel ratio.
LOVE where CuriosityStream is going! Changing the future, one subject at a time! Got my full support
Why not run the lawnmower over the grass clippings to cut them up even smaller?
what about making dry grass pellets and using a smoker to run the engine, would that make the process easier or cheaper?
As likely stated buy several others start with gelatinizing the grass, then use Alpha amylase to break down the sugars instead of buying acid, so that the yeast can ferment them. Next use a proper pot still, preferably with reflux capacity instead of the glass one, these can be obtained cheaply. This will more effectively produce a higher ABV product. I noted in the comments that the cover was not on the engine, this is important. Carburetor jets can be drilled out to be bigger. The best you can probably expect from using just grass would be a starting gravity of 1.040 to 1.060 which would only yield a potential pre-distillation alcohol content in the single digits. So the fix for this is going to be either add sugar or increase the volume of your fermentations to compensate. Finely grinding up the grass was a good step though.