[Stoves] 2 Papers: "Burns, scalds and poisonings from household energy..." and "Emissions...Paraffin TEGs
Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
crispinpigott at outlook.com
Wed Jul 6 08:25:22 CDT 2016
Dear Niel
Good quotes.
" Paraffin lamps are commonly used as light sources in low-income,
off-grid households. Pollutant emissions from these appliances are a
potential health hazard and a cause of material soiling by soot deposits.
That is clearly caused by poor combustion, not the fuel properties.
"The emission of black carbon, a product of incomplete combustion is a
requirement of a paraffin lamp to produce bright yellow light under
optimum combustion conditions, the flame would emit a weak illumination,
mainly in the blue wavelengths."
Hmm...well, sort of. There are two ways to make a light using paraffin: poor combustion at least part of the time (meaning it could be cleaned up at the end of the chamber) or adding something that glows when hot, which is what has been done with ‘illuminating paraffin’.
‘Power paraffin’ is the pure stuff and can be burned with no visible flame at all (see FLOX – FLameless OXidation). IF you want light, which is common among the poor, an additive is included to increase the amount of light produced.
A ‘mantle’ is a silk netting impregnated with metals to glow brightly. Otherwise a butane lantern or ‘white gas’ lamp wouldn’t illuminate much at all.
There is some light from the hottest metal parts but it is hard to get much of a lifetime from them:
That is an FSP stove burning illuminating paraffin. The ‘red’ is never really enough to light the room.
It has no smell at all. There were significant health benefits reported by (mostly) old men in the Free State (the FS part of the name) who had been using a wick stove as a space heater. When they switched to FDP stoves their emphysema cleared up. That means they were breathing unburned paraffin, probably evaporating from an overheated fuel tank rather than a combustion product.
Have you seen the LED lamp powered by a TEG that is heated by a candle? That is a cool technology!
Regards
Crispin
A point exploited to perfection towards the end of the 19th century, and
still available commercially as the 'Aladdin lamp'!
This has to be a problem of politics not technology surely?
If you burn paraffin with a blue flame in a chimneyed stove then you have
a clean cooking stove with a turn down ratio superior to this day to gas
or electric hobs as my Great Aunt taught me when she moved into a
bungalow with electricity, but retained her 'oil stove' for its low
simmering heat she could not achieve with her new electric cooker. I've
used them myself - they are excellent stoves, and the most controllable
of any.
As far as lighting is concerned, why if the political decision is made to
retain paraffin as an affordable fuel by the poorest in SA, cannot the
obsolete (in the west) 19th century technology of burning it with a blue
flame under an incandescent mantle be made available instead of dirty old
yellow flame wick lamps?! Candles are paraffin.
For those without first hand experience of the Aladdin lamp (40 candle
power), or the 'Tilley lamp' (paraffin pressure vapour lamp), (300 candle
power), or the 'primus stove' (paraffin pressure vapour) - All late
nineteenth century technologies, they burn cleanly without any smell,
except perhaps briefly when extinguished. They prove Crispin's point
that there is no such thing as a dirty fuel.
What is the matter with a world which having long since abandoned these
excellent clean burning technologies, underlining this abandonment in the
west by the political decision to end coal, and to price paraffin way
above petrol for cars (which attracts two thirds of its price in tax),
and is about £6 for 4 litres in the UK, whereas a few decades ago its
cost was a trivial fraction of petrol, none the less makes paraffin
affordable to the poorest in SA, but then fails to make clean burning
19th century technology, of no real residual interest to the west,
available by the same fiat decision? The answer is provided in one of
Crispin's links, and reveals that the fate of the poor is of so little
real interest to the political determiners of markets that they can't
even be bothered to leave piles of municipal woodchip lying around long
enough for collection as biomass fuel, but would rather transport it to
landfill!
Yes, the cost of producing an Aladdin blue flame circular wick burner,
plus the cost of fabricating a silk mantle will be higher than the
production of producing a yellow flame flat wick burner, but by how much
if the third world got given the plant?
How much compared with converting the fraction of a barrel of crude into
paraffin in a modern refinery, and selling it in a global market such
that the poorest South Arican can contemplate buying it, while it is
priced out for all practical purposes in the west?
What is the future of the Aladdin lamp, the sole manufacturer on the
planet of this type of lamp? It only survived at all to this day by the
skin of its teeth. Yet it seems that there is a whole 'market' out there
that would be grateful for such a 19th century advance to its living
standards, and yet we are talking instead of burning the paraffin in
doubtless much higher tech capital intensive generators to produce
incomplete spectrum light with LEDs! Who's agendas are these? Has
anyone thought to approach Aladdin to find a way to release its patents
for third world use?
I greatly admire the work you are all doing to improve biomass
cookstoves, an 'intermediate technology' the west whizzed past so fast it
never developed at all, but I sometimes wonder if somewhere there should
not be some efforts made to at least make the decent burners to go with
the fuel if they are going to continue to make fuel like paraffin
available at all.
Neil Taylor (whos Great Grandfather in the19th century made paraffin
burners apparently superior to anything available to the world's poorest
today!)
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