[Stoves] How to make smokeless coal?

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Mon May 22 13:55:27 CDT 2017


Dear Darpan

I would like to offer an alternative to this comment:

>We are talking about region specific fuel and user practise which is difficult to replace with smokeless dung, smokeless wood, smokeless diesel or even LPG. Smokeless coal is the cheapest and the most immediate solution to the problem.

There is another much cheaper alternative which is to build stoves with combustion systems that do not make ‘smoke’. A smokeless stove can burn supposedly ‘smoky fuel’ and emit no smoke. Semi-coking coal (or wood) greatly increases the cost per MJ and does not guarantee anything. All fuels are burned in a context and the context may be inappropriate.

After an examination of the matter one quickly comes to the position that only a combination of a certain fuel and stove emit no (or very low) amounts of smoke. Think of a diesel engine and diesel fuel: putting diesel fuel into a gasoline engine will create a great deal of smoke because it is not designed for that fuel. Same with stoves.

>Thus 'smokeless coal'.

There is no such thing as a ‘smokeless coal’. Or smokeless anything else. That is a marketing gimmick. Any fuel can be made to smoke.

Two evidences:

Testing by Guenther Baumbach<https://books.google.ca/books/about/Air_Quality_Control.html?hl=de&id=OCdSAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y> who literally wrote the book on air quality control and ambient particle measurements tested the emissions using various fuels from traditional Mongolian stoves in 2008, attended by Prof Tseyen-Oidov and myself. He showed that putting semi-coked briquettes into the unmodified stove did not reduce total emissions during a typical burn sequence. The emissions were from 0-35% greater! The reason for this is unanticipated result was that the semi-coked coal is much harder to light, the stove must be ignited with a larger mass of fuel initially (or it will not light at all), must be refuelled with a larger mass (or the fire goes out) and the stove must be refuelled earlier in the burn than with a raw coal fire (or the fire dies).

Testing by Altanzul at the China Agriculture University in 2016-17 showed that the emissions from semi-coked fuels were consistently higher than with the raw coal, provided ‘the stove’ in question was designed for the raw coal. It is a crossdraft gasifier.

These examples are evidence that the emissions from a fire cannot be predicted from the fuel analysis or pre-treatment alone. That said, it is agreed that the emissions from a PM coke fire burning in a badly designed stove are lower than the emissions from burning raw coal or raw wood or dung in a similar, badly designed stove. So what? We should compare what are technically appropriate alternatives.

My experience of promoters of semi-coked fuel products is that they do not to mention emissions during ignition, or even that the ignition technique makes a large difference in total emissions. Unfortunately there is no international standard for such reporting for domestic stove performance. Typically, emissions are reported in terms of mass concentration for which there is a widely known target of 50 milligrams per cubic metre of exhaust gases. As the concentration of emissions in a domestic chimney is irrelevant to the determination of ambient air pollution (because it is a distributed source) the metric, selected for large emitters, has little or no value.

Emissions from any fire are related to the completeness of combustion. If the raw coal is burned completely there are no PM emissions other than fly-ash which is a very different thing from BC + condensed hydrocarbon volatiles, plus it is easy to deal with. For anyone who would like test results demonstrating the effect of replacing a stove combustor that cannot burn wood or coal well with one that can, I am always happy to provide such data.

I think the conversation about fuel composition, fuel treatment and the suitability of different combustion devices is very valuable, especially for raising awareness that neither a fuel nor a stove can, on their own, be ‘clean’. The appellation reflects a conceptual error that requires corrections before large amounts of money are spent on ‘solutions’.

Regards

Crispin


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