Principles

Paul Anderson, March, 2009 How many of each major type of cookstoves exist in the developing societies(functioning in 2009)? The attached "draft" Matrix gives you my guesses. Perhaps YOU have additional input. Maybe we should change the Matrix. More columns, more lines. Or do you agree with what content? What I am attempting is to get us all reasonably "on the same page", literally on the same single page. Please look carefully at the two Notes at the bottom. In the general rank ordering, any stove type (or specific stoves within a type) might be shifted one or two columns to the left or right. But the question is, are the notes and orderings reasonably correct? There is no right or wrong, best or worst. By sheer numbers of units, the 3-stove fire is "best." It literally is "the competition to beat" for all of the other stoves. The file is an active MS Word document ( .doc), so you can change it as you please, but please indicate that you have altered it. (I desire neither the glory nor the blame for what you contribute.) It is a very small file and might be distributed with this message.

Design and Development of a Natural Draft Biomass Gasifier
R. Krishna Kumar February 28, 2009

Natural Draft Gasifier - Kumar

N D G - BASICS & PRINCIPLES

• Operates under the principlle of “ Chimney Effectt ”
• Natural draft caused by density difference

UNIQUE FEATURES COMPARED TO CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS

• No blower is required for the operation
• Automatically takes the required quantity of air for Gasification
• Convey the Producer Gas formed by Gasification - Naturally
• Reduced fuel consumption compared to traditional chulas

More detail, schematic pictures and testing information are in the attached pdfs and in the 2004 discussion:
http://www.repp.org/discussiongroups/resources/stoves/kumar/ndg.htm

Hello stoves community,

At ETHOS 2009 we held a panel on stove safety, bringing in viewpoints from corporate standards development, national standards certification, and small to medium scale developers. The team led by Nathan Johnson (Iowa State University) included Crispin Pemberton-Pigott (New Dawn Engineering), Casper Thijssen (Philips), and Karabi Dutta.

The panel gave a comparative analysis of how different stove industries (multinational corporations, medium-scale companies, NGOs, small developers, etc.) addressed fundamental stove safety questions. These topics included:

a) applicability of standards and regulation;
b) incentives and benefits
c) facilities and equipment availability
d) cost vs. benefit
e) resulting action

We determined that each type of industry has a different perspective that influences their path or actions towards a safer stove. And that all sub-industries may not produce safer stoves given the same incentive mechanisms or policies. As such more than one path to safety may be needed to reach the greatest amount of end-users (and producers). The panel ended the discussion with an overview present work in stove safety with recommendations for next steps.

Please view the attached file for more details. I will be leading a group in 2009 to work on the following: assemble database of injury data, b) analyze incentive mechanisms, cost/ benefit, c) development of lab testing procedures for different stove categories, d) publication of findings/ results, and e) look for partnerships with international agencies to support safer stove design and production.

Please contact me if you have any questions. There will be more updates to follow. Best,
Nathan Johnson
atlas@iastate.edu
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering, International Development
Iowa State University

This is an experiment using biomass in the KEROSENE WICK STOVE. http://e-kerbiostoveexp.blogspot.com/ (for more photographs) The stove was lit at the top using a little amount of biomass soaked in kerosene. The fine holes of 1 to 2 mm located all along the inner and outer frame are useful in achieving very good bluish flames. The flames continued for 30 to 45 minutes duration. Only at the end the performance was bad, the option was that, a lid was used to shut down safely. The fire was very high (Reasons I am not sure). If one does not have enough kerosene, and in emergency one can use the kerosene stoves too with fine wood shavings as fuel. The end product is very good biochar. I am thankful to TOM REED for explaining the functioning of a Kerosene stove, which was the motivation for doing this experiment. http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/stoves_listserv.repp.org/2009-January...
Also see http://e-woodgasstovemodified.blogspot.com/