So that ranges from trees to manure. Iowa State University engineer Robert Brown says Iowa's rich topsoil makes the state a veritable petri dish for biomass research. H ere at a lab, in the middle of a cornfield, Brown and his graduate students are trying to turn raw biomass into energy. This is a gasifier which converts solid fuels like woodchips and cornhusks into a gaseous fuel. It's kind of like combustion, says research engineer Jared Smenk, but more efficient.
Combustion is the oxidation of fuel.
Typically you're using air, the oxygen out of the air is your oxygen source and than reacting the air with your fuel and the product then is heat. What we do with gasification is a partial combustion. We only burn or oxidize about 25 percent of the fuel. The heat that's generated from that partial combustion draws reactions which converts the gaseous fuel. So you end up with a combustible gas called producer gas.