[Stoves] ABCEG deceit and conceit (Re: Crispin, Andrew) ON THE SIDE

[Traveller]

Ron:

Since I doubt there is anything "official" (please provide a definition),
it is indeed a "free for all". As it has been - in my view - in the
"stovers' world" for decades now.

As I wrote before, I for one don't care a hoot about fuel consumption as a
generally relevant metric for all biomass fuels in all contexts. I also
don't think lab tests are worth a bother, or that boiling water is any more
than intellectual pornography (see Webster, meaning 3).

That said, IF a procurement request (such as that by UN as Crispin
mentions) is written in terms of fuel consumption or combustion efficiency,
char as by-product is irrelevant.

Whether the WBT - and particular protocols, calculation methods - properly
reflects what it purports to measure is another matter. I gave up on that
30+ years ago and don't see any point in anybody bothering with it.

Yeah. I know the IWA crowd may be using a particular version of WBT. (I
read the PCIA presentations back in 2012).

The whole IWA shabang is so laughable. Did I say it is to cooking what
Playboy is to sex?

Merits of biochar are beside the point. I like the concept. I also endorse
Crispin's view, "There is a lot wrong with subtracting any number from the
mass of fuel in the denominator representing the fuel needed to perform the
cooking task." (WBT is not about cooking, so why should you and Crispin
quarrel in the first place? :-))

I am waiting for some model to bake crop productivity benefits of soil
char, other than carbon sequestration -- say, CSPIT, Char Soil Productivity
Intervention Tool, with instant online link to different crop price
forecasts in specific geographies and periods. There's gotta be some
benefit to soil char, but I suppose that is out of the scope for this list.
LNBL may be interested.


Nikhil


---------
(US +1) 202-568-5831


On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 9:36 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net>
wrote:

> Crispin:
>
> I guess I failed in some way to make my point.  It would help if you took
> some sentence(s) of mine and critique them.
>
> Twenty-some years ago, I believe essentially no-one was intentionally
> trying to make char while cooking.  I believe you are reading the official
> language and equation incorrectly.  If you think not, I suggest it is
> incumbent on you to quote something official.
>
> To repeat - there is NOTHING illogical about the equation.  With the
> subtraction, the denominator is a very physical quantity - it is the energy
> available if energy *had not gone into* making the char.  The equation
> makes an adjustment to reflect the best possible case for the stove (a
> device non intended to make char).
>
> I look forward to your commenting on what I wrote.
>
> Ron
>
>
>
> On Jan 12, 2017, at 3:52 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
> crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Ron
>
> The problems I have with the equation applied in the WBT are:
>
>
>    1. The resulting number is not what it claims to be (the thermal
>    efficiency). It is also not the energy efficiency, nor the heat transfer
>    efficiency, nor the % of energy available from ‘missing fuel’ that was
>    transferred to the pot.
>    2. It does not report a number that can be used to compare the fuel
>    efficiency of two or more stoves, its primary function and specific claim,
>    as applied in UN contracts, the GACC contracts, as well as the CDM and Gold
>    Standard methodologies. Relative fuel consumption in those projects are
>     *all* calculated incorrectly.
>    3. Producing char (or not) is not a cooking task and does not enter
>    its efficiency rating. Anything that interferes with the energy in the
>    denominator misleads the reader as to the product’s cooking performance.
>    4. The energy content of recovered char is not the same number as the
>    energy ‘not used for cooking’. It is a portion of the ‘not used’ number. In
>    short, if the stove made a lot of small ‘unrecoverable bits of char’ the
>    energy in the *recoverable* char is significantly less than the energy
>    in the residual solids. Subtracting the energy ‘not released by burning’
>    from the total energy available in the fuel fed in, would give a close
>    approximation of the heat transfer efficiency (the error being partially
>    combusted gases). But that is not what is happens with the WBT formula.
>    Only a portion of the energy in the solid residue is subtracted – the
>    ‘recoverable portion’. Well, who says what is recoverable and what is not?
>    Opinions differ. And, after making this subtraction, what is the proper
>    description of the result of the calculation? It describes no standard
>    reporting metric of thermal performance. It is just a number. It is not
>    even a*useful* number.
>    5. Users of the WBT have, for years, been led to believe that it
>    represents the fuel consumption and that comparing the two ‘WBT efficiency’
>    numbers from two stoves will show the comparative fuel savings by using the
>    formula
>
> (1-(Stove 1/Stove2))*100%
> The answer is the fuel saved in % (or increase). The answer is only
> correct if the energy in remnant char. Recoverable or not, is *not *subtracted
> from the denominator.
>
> Using the WBT ‘thermal efficiency’ numbers, it gives the wrong answer. The
> fuel use is under-reported.  The reason it gives the wrong answer is
> because it makes the calculation incorrectly. Mathematically, the method
> employed treats the recoverable portion of the remnant char as if it is
> unburned raw fuel.
>
> The End
>
> It is junk science and always was. It is an error introduced in 1985 by
> VITA against the objections of Feu do Bois and Eindhoven University. Upon
> review in 1991 (Rani et al) it was rejected as a calculation by the
> government of India. Good for them.
>
> I do not care how much people have invested in this WBT test. It lies. It
> is fatally flawed. It doesn’t give an answer people can believe. It has no
> place at the table. It has to go. It is cheating people out of their
> investments in stove programmes.  Everything based on it is fundamentally
> flawed – all decisions, all ratings, all money spent and wasted – and Lord
> knows there has been enough of that.
>
> Ron: If you want to report something about the char, use conventional
> methods and metrics, don’t piggy-back on junk science from Berkeley. So
> they made a mistake. Fine. Get over it.  Extending the deception will not
> help anyone. At this very moment it is deceiving the UN which is purchasing
> 10,000 stoves for refugees that will not live up to their performance
> ratings – because, *and only because*, they were tested using the WBT
> 4.2.3 and its defective spreadsheet v4.2.4 (Don’t ask me why the numbers
> don’t match – it doesn’t matter.)
>
> Char production is a function of the mass in and mass produced, expressed
> as a %. It also has an energy content. Fine. Report it. The downstream uses
> of char from char-making stoves do not affect in any way the cooking
> efficiency which is a measure of the fuel needed to conduct a cooking
> session.
>
> It is pointless to try to convince us who are working in the field and
> spending other people’s money to report that a stove using 1.3 kg per of
> dry fuel cooking cycle uses 650 g ‘because it makes char’. I do not care
> what type of fuel is going in – if it takes 1.3 kg per time, then the fuel
> consumption will be reported to be 1.3 kg, efficiency *x*. If it produces
> 400 g of char doing so, and you want to report it, the report can say: dry
> fuel consumption is 1.3 kg per replication; char produced 400 g per 1.3 kg
> of fuel (31%); cooking efficiency *x*. There is no free lunch.
>
> There is nothing wrong with reporting the fuel consumption of a stove.
> There is nothing wrong with reporting the mass or energy of char produced.
> There is a lot wrong with subtracting any number from the mass of fuel in
> the denominator representing the fuel needed to perform the cooking task.
> That is called ‘cheating’.
>
> I have already reported on this list a method for calculating the
> performance of a pair of stoves like that produced by Dr Nurhuda wherein
> the second uses the char produced by the first as its input fuel. Any such
> evaluation can produce the correct answer for the system efficiency of the
> pair *only* by correctly calculation the performance of the first stove,
> which means avoiding the WBT thermal efficiency formula. This is a matter
> of science, not opinion.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20170112/e7a03d9f/attachment.html>