[Stoves] Corn cob burner for making salt

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

[Default] On Thu, 27 Aug 2015 22:46:27 +0800,Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
<crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

>Dear Friends of Salt
>
> 
>
>This is a photo of a corn cob-fired salt boiler in Lombok Island, Eastern
>Indonesia. The hole from which the flame is emerging is the secondary air
>inlet. You may wonder why there is a large flame coming out of it. Well,
>that is a good question. The reason is that so much air is getting through
>the grate that it is able to support the gasification of the fuel and send
>flames to the chimney at one end and out the air intake at the other. It
>could use a little tweaking.


It looks like it's wasting a fair bit of heat, does the water have to
boil or just gently evaporate leaving crystals as more seawater is
added. Why are there loose cobs around this "secondary air inlet"?

Presumably only using the flat bottom of the pan as a heat exchanger
is limiting thermal efficiency as well as losses to this flare.

With seawater yielding about 40kg/tonne it must be evaporating ~2
tonne of water whose sensible and latent heat would be around 1350kWh
which at 100% efficiency would need the stove to run for 16 hours!

Or does my maths need checking again?

AJH