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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."
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
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.
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.