The New Turbo Wood Gas Stove

THE NEW TURBO WOOD-GAS STOVE*
A Bioenergy Innovation From Community Power Corporation

Conventional wood fire cooking is a leading contributor to respiratory and eye diseases among rural women and children and puts extreme pressures on dwindling forest resources. CPC’s new Turbo Stove combines advanced gasification technology and forced convection to virtually eliminate harmful emissions while substantially reducing the amount of fuelwood required to cook a meal. For households with PV Solar Home Systems or other sources of a few watts of DC or AC electricity, the Turbo Stove is a low-cost, but high value, cooking device that uses wood or agricultural residues to approach the performance, convenience and safety of modern bottled gas cooking.

What It Is?

A wood-gas, adjustable heat, cooking stove that burns small pieces of wood or other biomass fuels such as nut shells, corn cobs, etc.

An extremely clean burning stove that can be used indoors with only minimal ventilation

A powerful stove that cooks as fast as a modern gas or electric stove

A woodfuel stove that can be easily adjusted from high to low intensity for a rapid boil or a long, slow simmer

How Does It Perform?

Will boil a typical tea pot of water in 3-4 minutes

Will simmer for up to two hours for slow cooking to save fuel and food nutrients

Starts easily and fast --ready for high intensity cooking in less than one minute

High efficiency (~50%) – Substantially cuts amount of fuelwood required compared to normal wood fire cooking

Produces extremely low emissions that will virtually eliminate respiratory and eye diseases due to smoke inhalation

What Fuels Does It Use?

Wood chips, sticks, shavings, biomass pellets, etc.

Agricultural residues such as nut shells, stocks, corn cobs, etc.

Less than 500g (1 lb) of wood or other biomass fuel per hour

Tests are underway to confirm performance on a variety of agricultural residues

What Is Left?

Wood ash that can be used for fertilizer

25% charcoal that can be sold or will continue to burn for longer cooking times

* Patent Pending

Other Possible Applications

Community cooking, restaurants

Small rural industries, health clinics, small hospitals, etc.

Lighting (operate as a gasifier and use producer gas as fuel for mantle lights)

Other applications where clean, controllable heat is required (boiling, drying, etc.)

OPERATIONAL DESCRIPTION OF THE TURBO WOOD-GAS STOVE

Typical wood cooking fires or stoves do not mix air with fuel properly so they burn inefficiently and emit great quantities of harmful smoke and particulates.. This problem can largely be eliminated by first converting fuel wood to a gas and correctly mixing the gas with air so it can burn as clean as a modern bottled gas stove.

The CPC "Turbo Wood-Gas Stove" combines a specially designed gasification chamber, mixer and burner to provide a 3 kW(thermal) high intensity heat with only 10 g/minute of fuel. A 2 watt "micro-blower" provides a fully variable amount of air just where and when it is needed to achieve the Turbo Stove’s very high performance levels. This innovation makes it easy to adjust the cooking intensity and time for frying, boiling, or simmering a wide variety of foods for up to two hours on a single charge of fuel. The Turbo Stove can be easily manufactured locally from standard parts and materials. Since the Turbo Stove needs only about 2 watt-hours of electricity to cook a meal, it can be used with many common sources of electricity such as Solar Home Systems, a separate battery and very small PV charger, automobile or motorcycle batteries, flashlight batteries, AC power from the grid, etc. Mechanical power Turbo Stoves that do not require electricity are also under development.

STATUS OF DEVELOPMENT

The CPC Turbo Stove is ready for field trials. One and two burner prototypes are currently undergoing laboratory testing and refinement. CPC recognizes that local conditions and customer preferences will require numerous adaptations of the Turbo Stove. These adaptations make it difficult to predict the manufacturing cost. However, there are many features of the Turbo Stove that will result in a low cost, affordable product including simple design, ability to use local materials, and simple manufacturing with common tools found in developing countries.

CPC’S OBJECTIVE

CPC is developing the Turbo Stove to significantly enhance the quality of life of women and children in rural households that cook with wood or other biomass residues and to support resource conservation and management initiatives. The first application of the Turbo Stove is for CPC’s and other energy services companies’ customers that enjoy the modern benefits of PV Solar Home Systems (SHS) but continue to use traditional wood-fire cooking. This initial association with the PV SHS, led the stove to be referred to as the "PV" Turbo Stove.

Due to the very strong interest in the Turbo Stove by the development and environmental communities and renewable energy services companies, CPC is now seeking partnerships that will lead to field trials in numerous countries, ongoing development and refinement of the product and, eventually, widespread dissemination of the Turbo Stove. CPC encourages any organization that is interested in working with CPC to demonstrate, develop and deploy the Turbo Stove for a particular market to contact us as follows:

Robb R. Walt, President Tel (303) 690-7869 Fax (303) 617-1280 EM: robbcpc@aol.com

Art Lilley, Vice President Tel (724) 348-6386 Fax (724) 348-8923 EM: artsolar@usaor.net

Dr. Tom Reed, Bioenergy Division Tel (303) 258-0558 Fax (303) 278-0560 EM: ReedTB@compuserve.com

COMMUNITY POWER CORPORATION

CPC is a private US company dedicated to developing and deploying sustainable energy and modern infrastructure services for the benefit of people and their environment throughout the world. To date, CPC’s primary business activities are with its joint venture in Indonesia and its business development initiatives in the Philippines and Brazil.

CPC 10-23-98