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Engineers Aim To Make Cleaner-Burning Cookstoves For Developing World
vinces99 writes in with news about a new cookstove design for developing countries. "About 3 billion people, or 42 percent of the world's population, rely on burning materials such as wood, animal dung or coal in stoves for cooking and heating their homes. Often these stoves are crudely designed, and poor ventilation and damp wood can create a smoky, hazardous indoor environment day after day. A recent study in The Lancet estimates that 3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution. University of Washington engineers hope to make a dent in these numbers by designing a cookstove that meets a stringent set of emission and efficiency standards while still being affordable and attractive to families who cook over a flame each day. The team has received a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design a better cookstove, which researchers say will use half as much fuel and cut emissions by 90 percent."
Didnt Philips do this 5 to 10 years ago????/
Didn't Ben Franklin do this 250 years ago?
"The Franklin stove is a metal-lined fireplace named after its inventor, Benjamin Franklin. It was invented in 1741. It had a hollow baffle near the rear (to transfer more heat from the fire to a room's air) and relied on an "inverted siphon" to draw the fire's hot fumes around the baffle. It was intended to produce more heat and less smoke than an ordinary open fireplace."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_stove
Here's a picture of the traditional stove. Truly inefficient, you can see plenty of wasted energy leaving out the sides. ok.
Here's a picture of the new stove they are considering.
The new one does look more efficient, but it looks like it costs 10 times more. Are people really going to buy it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And fire places, people have been successfully using them for hundreds of years without killing themselves.
It happened quite often.
Try thinking a little more carefully about the clothes women wore.
It's called rocket stove and can be built easily from different material:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove
Here's a picture of the traditional stove. Truly inefficient, you can see plenty of wasted energy leaving out the sides. ok.
Here's a picture of the new stove they are considering.
The new one does look more efficient, but it looks like it costs 10 times more. Are people really going to buy it?
Ten times more? The first one looks free. Honestly this looks like yet another ivory tower project complete with a budget, interns, and computer aided engineering all to 'invent' something that has been around for ages.
This time it is the free-from-trash Hobo stove. I'll research the idea for half price, only 450k. Hell, I'll even send the Department of Energy a few samples, just let me find my old coffee cans....
This reminds me of this project: Potential Energy (formerly The Darfur Stoves Project)
Popular Mechanics covered it in this article: Low-Tech Stove Saves Lives in Sudan's Darfur Region
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Enclosed stove with a stack and convection-based oxygenating of fuel, been done for thousands of years in various places in asia and africa. I swear, I get tired of reading of "innovations" that seem to be rediscovered every decade of my 50 years, but this is even more annoying.
Rocket stoves work pretty good. They burn at a higher temperature and consume more of the fuel while reducing emissions. Very easy to construct and cheap to fuel with just sticks and leaves.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
do tell, what "natural materials" are suitable for making a stove that don't require massive amounts of energy to modify for the purpose? If you are going to suggest a giant clay stove I'll laugh at you, they exist but only in places in no need of this article's stove, for an excellent reason.
Actually TLUD stoves would create char coal and burn the pyrolysis gases, now they are just wasted. The article is low on detail, here is a free ebook about stoves and their use in 3rd world countries:
http://www.biochar-international.org/sites/default/files/Understanding-Stoves-okt-10-webversion.pdf
and a slide show that explains the principle:
http://www.bme.gouv.ht/ugse/TCharbon%20Kara%20Grant%20-%20English.pdf
I haven't seen this mentioned in the article which is somewhat thin on detail, but there is way more to stoves than the article explains. Also Burn Design Lab doesn't explicitly mention the TLUD design.
Oh, here is another website:
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Somehow the UW related stuff is free of the TLUD principle, I wonder why. Also, you are wrong.
Je me souviens.
In 1742, Franklin finished his first design which implemented new scientific concepts about heat which had been developed by the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), a proponent of Isaac Newton's ideas. Two years later, Franklin wrote a pamphlet describing his design and how it operated in order to sell his product. Around this time, the deputy governor of Pennsylvania, George Thomas, made an offer to Franklin to patent his design, but Franklin never patented any of his designs and inventions. He believed “that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously”.
Wow.
Better known as 318230.
I've made molten steel from scrap in a "giant clay stove". The clay was a chrome magnesite clay but it came out of the ground like that and the "stove" was an arc furnace, but there's plenty of stuff that can be found in a variety of places that can handle less extreme conditions.
Enclosed stove with a stack and convection-based oxygenating of fuel, been done for thousands of years in various places in asia and africa.
The stove in the article looks exactly like the cookstoves we made from coffee cans when I was in the girl scouts*. They work well, and are a big improvement over an open fire, but I don't see anything new about it.
*Yes, I was a male girl scout. My mom was the scout leader, and my sisters were already girl scouts, so she signed me up too. My mom was a tough scout leader. Years later, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and it was a piece of cake compared to my mom's girl scout troop. -- Semper Fi, and Be Prepared.
http://www.biolitestove.com/homestove/overview/ for the "homestove" which is intended for folks who need it "full time". Yes, it is more expensive, but they are working on funding sources.
One of the funding sources is us outdoor geeks, on their website you can find the campstove, the campgrill and the upcoming pot. Some of their profits go towards their homestove work.
I've got the campstove, it does a very nice job. Perhaps by next summer I'll invest in the grill.
...but isn't man's disruption of the natural processes that keep the population in check a direct contributor to the world overpopulation problem? From a strictly scientific point of view, drastically altering the mortality rate of the world's population by decreasing it (and increasing the birth/death ration) can't be a good thing. Many of these people have lived generations in their current environment, so why does a first world country believe they have the right to disrupt nature in such a drastic way?
So a first world country solves the woodstove problem, thereby decreasing mortality rates. Are they prepared to then step in and deal with inadequate water supplies, increases in loss of arable lands, higher rates of infant mortality, and other side effects of overpopulation?
Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.
"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.
Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.
=S