[Stoves] DUE Conference, Cape Town

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Friends

The DUE conference is held annually in Cape Town, South Africa, this year
attended by 185 researchers and scientists. 

http://active.cput.ac.za/energy/public/index.asp?pageid=525  says:

"Developing countries in particular, face many challenges in the effective
use and generation of electricity. DUE therefore focuses on the response to
the looming threats of another energy crisis. Related issues addressed
include sustainable energy provision; smart control systems, appropriate
legislation and its implementation; the role of renewables; off-grid
electricity supply, feed-in tariffs and power purchase agreements. These
challenges are particularly marked in the rural and remote areas of
developing countries."

It had been my intention to provide the links necessary to access the papers
from the 19th Domestic Use of Energy conference in Cape Town a few weeks ago
but the papers are still not on line. When they are, they will appear under
"2011" at http://active.cput.ac.za/energy/public/index.asp?pageid=538 which
only goes to 2010 at the moment.

This year there was a parallel session devoted to domestic stoves bringing
the number to three (parallel sessions). A major contribution was made, a
total of 7 papers and 3 workshops, presented by staff from the University of
Johannesburg, most of them from the SeTAR Centre/Geography Department. The
papers include a preliminary comparison of results from the WBT3 and SeTAR
Centre's Heterogeneous Test Protocol (HPT). Another was on low smoke solid
fuel combustion. There are too many to list here.  It is my presumption that
they will be available soon.

A paper titled "Mitigation Of Ulaanbaatar City's Air Pollution - From Source
Apportionment To Ultra-Low Emission Lignite Burning Stoves" was presented by
Lodoysamba and Pemberton-Pigott. It described the method used to collect
city air particles, use time-series and nuclear analyses to establish that
the source of most of the particulates were emitted during the ignition of
domestic coal stoves burning at a low temperature. This information was used
to concentrate on the ignition cycle of stoves, which quickly resulted in
the development of several practical cooking and heating stoves with a 99%
reduction in PM emissions. It was (happily) the recipient of the Best Paper
Award 2011.

As the method used is available to many laboratories or universities, it
will be of interest to anyone working on macro-scale urban pollution
reduction. One import discovery is that the stove-sourced PM emissions
measured in the city air were not related to the total mass of coal burned,
but rather to the number of times the stoves were ignited. This overthrows
the common impression that coal necessarily emits soot (particles)
continuously while burning and that they are a fuel characteristic, rather
than a stove characteristic. These ideas were found not to apply to
Ulaanbaatar and the local brown coal from Nalaikh.

The domestic stove with no fan is very different from a coal-fired power
station, upon whose emissions the mistaken impression about soot is based.
It is quite apparent from this work over the past year that soot (PM) from
domestic stoves is caused by the poor combustion of volatiles, and that it
is not an inherent characteristic of the whole fuel or the volatiles. In
many tests now being performed, the stoves are burning with undetectable PM
emissions (PM0.1 to PM10) or even negative emissions, as the stoves are
actually cleaning the air that goes into them from the room during major
portions of the burn.

In a separate paper, "Development Of A Low Smoke Mongolian Coal Stove Using
A Heterogeneous Testing Protocol" and an accompanying workshop, "Solid Fuel
Combustion" I describe what I think is going on in these cleaner burning
stoves. There is still a great deal to learn and share, of course.

 

In the meantime I can send papers I have at hand to anyone who would like to
follow these developments. James, if you get wind of a direct link to them,
please buzz.

 

Best regards

Crispin