[Stoves] Irrelevant lab testing - for what purpose?

[Nikhil Desai]

To continue in my criticism of WBT and energy efficiency as a performance
metric....

I discovered a paper by Aprovecho folks - Nordica MacCarty, Dean Still and
Damon Ogle, "Fuel use and emissions performance of fifty cooking stoves in
the laboratory and related benchmarks of performance
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082610000311> Energy
for Sustainable Development, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages
161–171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2010.06.002.

.. The authors claim in the Abstract:


Performance of 50 different stove designs was investigated using the 2003
University of California-Berkeley (UCB) revised Water Boiling Test (WBT)
Version 3.0 to compare the fuel use, carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate
matter (PM) emissions produced. While these laboratory tests do not
necessarily predict field performance for actual cooking, t*he elimination
of variables such as fuel, tending, and moisture content, helps to isolate
and compare the technical properties of stove design*.


It stretches credulity that stove designs are tested on the basis of
excluding fuel, tending, and moisture content.

This is engineering madness. Standard fuel, standard pots, standard water.
No cook, just the theologians of thermodynamics.  I am surprised Tom Miles
thinks I am crazy to call that the dominant paradigm of stovers needs to be
shaken from the root to the skies. What there is to protect will stay, but
WBT not only must go, all past results of WBT must be dumped as "technical
error".

It has been a technical terror.

I can understand Aprovecho engineers' vested interests in a certain kind of
"stoves ideology" but I wonder if they realize just how laughable they are
to the world with statements like

"From this data, *it was possible to recommend benchmarks of improved
cookstove performance*. " and that


'Five of the stoves presented here were also tested at the US EPA, with
results agreeing within 20% or better on all fuel and emissions
measures, *suggesting
standard evaluation at various locations is possible*.


Probably doesn't matter. So long as EPA and Approvecho results coincide,
their interests and ideological agenda will also coincide. All in the name
of fact-free, cook-free science of cookstoves.

Boil blood, not water. This whole storm of "standards" is a nightmare or a
pleasant dream, take your pick. Emission rates and efficiency ratios have
little to do with usefulness of a cookstove.

Nikhil



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(India +91) 909 995 2080 <+91%2090999%2052080>
*Skype: nikhildesai888*
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