The Marvelous Chicken-powered Motorcar!

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The real secret of a rapid, strong and complete transformation of waste into the maximum amount of methane is the maintenance of the 85 to 90° F temperature at which the necessary bacteriological digestion is most active. If the temperature of the digester rises above 104° F, no gas will be produced at all and - in extremely hot regions - a methane production unit should be shaded or otherwise protected from the heat. A digester set up in a temper ate or cooler zone, on the other hand, may need some supplemental heating from an electric element inside toe tank or a small kerosene (or methane!) flame under the unit.

By the way, for those who speculate that tile methane used to heat the digester might total more than the gas produced by the unit . . . taint so! An extremely low flame (a car sump heater is ideal) under a Bate digester can cause the tank to yield a right vigorous flow of gas.

Bate has fitted his digester tank with a safety valve set for 60 p.s.i. "just in case". Pressures in the extractor seldom reach a third that level, however, because Harold considers a digester internal pressure of 20 p.s.i. to be the signal to start up a high-pressure compressor (of the type used for filling aqualung diving bottles) and pump the collected gas from the extractor into an ordinary high-pressure bottle.

A filter between the digester and pressure bottle extracts the small quantities of phosphoric acid and ammonia that are present and the remaining almostpure methane liquifies at a pressure of 1110 p.s.i.

Bate finds that it takes about one-half hour of steady pumping to fill a 32-pound (4.5 Imperial gallon) bottle to its capacity of liquid methane. This figures out to approximately 200 cubic feet of dry gas . . . or a fuel equivalent of seven gallons of good petrol (about eight and three-quarters gallon of high-test gasoline, to readers in the US).

The digester will continue to produce for several weeks and will then have to be topped up with more manure and the sludge run off. All in all, a single filling of 300 pounds of manure will produce about 1500 cubic feet of methane equivalent to roughly 50 gallons of petrol (62 US gallons). That's not bad and Bate figures it costs him only three cents to produce the equal of an Imperial gallon of petrol.

Once he had a guaranteed supply of methane, Harold next faced the problem of getting the high-pressure gas into his car's engine in the exact amount required by the powerplant under all operating conditions. His answer, of course, was the now-famous 6" x 5" carburetor attachment which he calls the Bate Auto Gas Converter.

The attachment (it looks like a model flying saucer) fits between the methane pressure bottle and the car's carburetor and allows the cylinders of the engine to suck just enough methane--and no more-from the bottle as the fuel is needed. The only modification made on the engine itself is the simple tubular jet which is threaded into the choke tube of the carburetor before the throttle butterfly valve. A run of rubber tubing connects this to the Bate converter and a further run goes back to wherever the methane bottle is carried. No mechanical linkage or other complicated modification is necessary.

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