[Stoves] Mongolian stove for heating

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Paul

 

1.  Important heating-stove and air quality work is being done in Mongolia.
Congratulations to all who are involved.   Seems the World Bank is the big
backer.   

 

Acknowledged. Thanks. The WB is not the biggest backer: Millennium Challenge
Corporation (MCC) put up the largest lump of money which had a spend
deadline of Sept 2013 so they dived in early. There was a lot of rushing as
a result but it worked. The local government is also deeply committed as the
city had the worst pollution of any capital city in the world. It is also
the coldest capital and virtually everyone who looked at the problem said
for years that the only solution was to stop people burning coal. I was
brought in in 2007 to see what could be done with what they had. The result,
a huge reduction in source pollution, is directly because of improved
stoves, not fuel substitution or fuel banning (though a fuel ban came and
went). There are still improvements that can be made. There is still big
resistance to the idea that coal can be burned cleanly, just as there is
resistance to the idea that wood can be virtually smokeless, but people are
getting past that canard. Donors, not so much.

 

The conclusions 'about what is possible' are not made by people who have
looked at the solutions, only the problem. The whole concept of 'dirty
fuels' and 'dirty stoves' is fatally flawed, as we have previously discussed
on this list. Wood, coal and kerosene can be burned extraordinarily cleanly
in the right devices.  People often use the wrong devices.

2.  Information flow about these efforts is horrible.   Our ONLY source of
info has been Crispin.   THANKS!!!!    Otherwise, this is almost off of the
radar for Stoves discussions openly on  the Internet.   I searched for  

Ulaanbaatar Clean Air Project (UB-CAP)   

 

The project documents are available at the World Bank (a lot but well hidden
including the AMHIB report), at MCC's site and some from LBNL (Berkeley)
which was the technical team for MCC. ADB has a few. The lab manual is out
there somewhere. It has a lot in it.

 

Very interesting that even Crispin (an adviser to the project, but about
emissions and evidently not about stove design / manufacturing) does not
have clear photos / tech drawings / and other info about the stoves
themselves.

 

My early involvement was heavily spent on stove design (and
standards/protocols) to get the local manufacturers aware of what was
possible in terms of emissions, to improve the heat exchanger efficiency and
to get the ignition process to be far more rapid. Several innovations
relating to heating stoves came from that. I worked for GIZ to create the
GTZ7 series and to turn an existing GTZ5 into a TLUD which was quite
successful. The GTZ7 stove (original version) drawings are on my website
here <http://www.newdawnengineering.com/website/library/Stoves/gtz7/> . With
various producers we at the lab (paid for by the Asian Development Bank -
they also have documents) local producers created much better products and
became better designers. I went through 4 generations of downdraft stove in
collaboration with the SeTAR Centre at the Univ of Johannesburg, resulting
in 2 patents. It is now BLDD6.  There is a lot of local manufacturing
capacity in Ulaanbaatar, underutilised in my opinion. Lots of technical
skill. The training is good, the designs have been lacking.

 

Here is an improve ignition stove. Look at the top left screen, top line.
That is the combustion chamber temperature. It has a phenomenal rise in the
first minute. The dip is the switch over from wood to coal. On the top right
is a window with an upward sloping line. That is the burn rate (mass change
per minute). Dead straight line. Stack temp is constant at 200 C. Now that
is a high performance stove. 

 




3.  The fuel is wet lignite with over 50% volatiles.   FANTASTIC!!!   TLUD
stoves thrive on getting volatiles released from solid fuel, and THEN do the
clean burning a few centimeters away!!!!   



That is a very important aspect of getting a clean burning stove. It is hard
to light semi-coked fuels. JICA (Japan) has been working in parallel with us
on large burners >100kW in most cases and they long have advocated
semi-coked coal but it is three times the price and they won't make the fuel
briquettes small enough to work properly on small burners. They should never
be larger than 1/6th the diameter of the combustion chamber. Better 1/10th. 

 

Germany usually pushes semi-coke as well because that is how they cleaned up
their air in short order. But that is just putting low volatiles fuel into a
poorly designed burner. Get a better burner and it is far better to use the
cheap, hydrogen-rich fuels. People are poor and there is no gain from
processing the fuels. There is a lot of energy lost in the process,
pointlessly. Semi-coke is not nice to work with. More is needed to start,
and more has to be added earlier in the burn than with other raw fuels. Loss
upon loss. 


4.  The stoves are heavy (high mass which is good for heating-stoves) with
cast iron and ceramic (which is great for withstanding the higher
temperatures of burning some (maybe much or all) of the final carbon
(similar to coking coal once the volatiles are gone) at relatively high
temperatures for the "typical sheet-metal TLUD stoves" for tropical
climates.



The local traditional stoves are very light and made from 2mm sheet metal.
They are very good wood stoves. They are (unmodified) lousy coal stoves. The
mass is not as important as one might assume. I expect to see light,
portable highly efficient, very low smoke coal stoves eventually. There is a
stove development centre just being assembled now - a world first I think.
It is next to the SEET Lab. It has an unusual operating mandate.


5.  The GACC and the EPA programs about cookstoves do not (I believe)
include COAL-burning stoves.   This needs to be corrected.   I certainly
hope it is resolved well before the November GACC Forum in Ghana.   The
success in Mongolia should be well documented and well disseminated.

 

There is strong institutional resistance to burning coal, rooted in the US
and EU. I have complained here about the failure to the Stove Comparison
Chart to even list the stoves emerging from Mongolia which would be tucked
into the bottom left corner of 'Tier 4' if they were. They are far better
than nearly all wood stoves - out of necessity.  North American coals are
not often same the quality as the Mongolian (young) coals as far as domestic
users are concerned. NA coals can have a lot of sulphur as well. It varies a
lot.  Nalaikh has 0.2%. It qualifies as 'Very Low Sulphur Coal
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Very_low_sulphur_coal> ' which
is also available in Indonesia.


Note:   Fossil fuels increase the final CO2 in the atmosphere, but that CO2
is "acceptable" in some circles, such as by those who promote LPG, which is
extremely clean burning (but is carbon positive).   Allowing for that, the
issue of CLEAN fuel is about other emissions (black carbon, methane,
Particulate Matter PM, CO etc.).   Therefore, there are NO DIRTY FUELS, but
only DIRTY STOVES that cannot burn the fuels well.   Kerosene (parafin)
dripped into a TLUD or Rocket or other stove will give a dirty fire.  That
is a user error, not a stove error.   Countless examples could be given of
inappropriate burning of fuels.   But what is important is that any one type
of fuel can be cleanly burned in at least ONE design of stove.  



Any problem caused by CO2 in the atmosphere is not created by poor people
cooking soup and heating their yurts. We should be realistic about these
things. There is nothing else to burn and there is a huge local supply, and
it goes to -50 C even in the city.


Related:   Even if we could have one of the Mongolian TLUD stoves available
for viewing and testing, most certainly the same fuel (high volatile wet
lignite) would be needed for any appropriate testing of the stove.
Different types of coal would probably not burn as cleanly in that stove.



I expect that most of the stoves would run better on harder drier coal. The
problem for UB is that most of the stoves were designed to run on something
else, and they happen (by fluke mostly, not design) to be able to deal with
the Nalaikh and Baganuur coals. Some that will pass (70 mg/MJnet) with
Nalaikh will not pass with Baganuur which is younger and friable and
somewhat like sheets of paper. If heated primary air is provided it gasses
like crazy. As the City government tightened the emission targets, early
winners failed subsequent tests largely because they would not listen to the
design advice from the lab. There are too many people trying to provide all
the air through the fuel - an approach that only works with particular coals
of particular content and particular size. 

 

People frequently blame the fuel for poor performance but it is really the
mismatch. I built a J-Stove in 2007 for $20 to demonstrate totally smokeless
burning in a downdraft burner (termed the Mongolian Reference Burner). It
was used to show people that they should stop blaming the fuel and just
build a stove that worked properly using the available fuel. 


6.  We (the collective "we the Stovers") could certainly benefit from
further information from Mongolia.   I suspect that a Chinese-speaking
American engineer-type person could greatly assist with this.   I am
wondering how much the Mongolian advancement is already being introduced
into northern China.   Or is there a "not invented here" barrier to the
spread of the progress?



Not invented here is yet more different from 'invented in Mongolia'. The
problem is real. We need to get the stove development centre going. A lot
will come from that. All the progress made so far has been too unpredictable
and chancy. Much more effort is needed on optimising the ignition and
refuelling methods. TLUDs are not good for refuelling and people don't like
that. It is a temporary solution. The water heating low pressure boilers
will create a lot of opportunity because they are large investments that
leave some room for advanced technologies. We will try to make stoves that
generate 2 kW of electricity too. I feel we can get the fuel consumption
down by 40%.  There is a lot going on. It is unfortunate so many have
vilified the fuel and preconceived the solutions. As you can tell by now,
the locals are not listening much and have largely solved the problem.

 

Incidentally, when you see the stoves and get drawings, don't assume
anything about the ability of any stove to burn a different fuel. It is very
difficult to know in advance, though we can usually tell what a bad stove
will look like. Good and very good ones are more by chance because the
fundamentals of combustion and fuel evolution are still estimated by guess
and by golly. I don't think one manufacturer has a decent test facility. And
even if they do, what is the protocol?

 

It is important to consider that virtually no European, Indian, Chinese or
Nordic stove will meet the very tight performance demands of UB City. In the
coming two years a new generation of cross draft stoves will emerge. Once
lit, they produce virtually no smoke at all. 

 

Here is an interesting photo:



 

On the left is Berkeley's (LBNL) Dusttrak which was new and we calibrated it
against the lab's one. They agreed within a couple of micrograms/m3. The one
on the left is drawing ambient air (see, no-pipe) and showing 195 micrograms
per m3 and the one on the right is connected to the stove on the test bed.
The stove is literally cleaning the air that passes into it. A refuellable
cross draft stove that runs long enough, will have net-negative PM emissions
because they will only make smoke (from the wood) during ignition.

 

Then we will light them with gas!  :) 

 

Regards

Crispin

 

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