[Stoves] Irrelevant lab testing - for what purpose?

Frank Shields franke at cruzio.com
Mon Jun 5 11:38:31 CDT 2017


Nikhil,

Dear Nikhil, Stovers,


There are lots of stove developers out there that would like to have their designed stove in the running. We need a way to include all of them or we miss out on some great ideas. Going into the field is expensive and takes a lot of people. The lucky stoves chosen for the study is picked by what means? And are they the best stoves for the location? and available fuel supply?  A fair method for choosing the stoves taking to the next step (field) is needed. Lab testing is relatively cheep and used for this purpose. 

The only part of real world we lab people need to mimic is the energy supply that does the work. The other parts of the 6-Box system is any representative task where we have control over the completion. 

Using pellets or processed lumber fuel is not a good mimic of the real world variable wild biomass. I’m thinking the percent of the biomass producing pyrolyzed gases in N2 environment is a good measure for the energy going to the secondary. Most important is that it can be specific to each biomass and easily and reproducibly determined. We can then (if this works) predict the best stoves for an area. 

When you think of the different biomass used for fuels like briquettes, dung, coal, wood, corncobs, pressed biomass, rice etc.etc. this method can be used across all of them. 

We use boiling water as a task. We could use rice but we introduce a couple more variables. What kind of rice and when (exactly) is it called ‘cooked’. We could use boiling carrots cut to specific size and a penetrometer. We could add sawdust to the water to represent soup. What to you suggest other than water?

Once we  get the selection of stoves for an area (that use their fuel and cooks their food) we can make the next level of selection. Do they need fuel savings? is air quality an issue? what fuel prep is required to prepare to work in the stove, etc. 

The lab is needed to get all those that wants to into the game. Its affordable and create a list of stoves that have a good chance of working at a specific site. 

If we introduce a list of workable stoves to the people and let them pick I think there will be less contamination of the receiving site from our influence.  Not happy with the stove they picked then they should have picked a different one. 


 Frank 

 





> On Jun 4, 2017, at 10:19 AM, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Frank: 
> 
> How does what you propose mimic "real world"?
> 
> And whatever made you think boiling water is a representative task around all users? 
> 
> Time to stop boiling water and fussing over energy efficiency with some standard fuel, standard cook, standard cuisine. 
> 
> I do like your idea of a "spider graph". Why can't we design 10 or 20 such spidergraphs for any particular region for permutation and combination of actual fuels, stoves, and different metrics than energy or char outputs? What is this theory that a cook wants to maximum energy utilization out of a supposedly free fuel? 
> 
> Nikhil
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nikhil Desai
> (India +91) 909 995 2080
> Skype: nikhildesai888
> 
> 
> 

Thanks

Frank
Frank Shields
Gabilan Laboratory
Keith Day Company, Inc.
1091 Madison Lane
Salinas, CA  93907
(831) 246-0417 cell
(831) 771-0126 office
fShields at keithdaycompany.com



franke at cruzio.com



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