[Stoves] News: Methanol cooking fuel for india...

[Andrew Heggie]

On Sun, 23 Dec 2018 at 14:46, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

>
> I found two things odd about the low concentration ethanol story and
> perhaps you can comment. Why low concentration? Was it easy to make? Or
> make without a distillation process? Or a *good* distillation process?
>
> Ethanol is being tried in Madagascar maybe for the past five years. Kenya
> is in their sights. The local producers have no problem getting 85%
> concentration which is above the SANS requirement of 80%.
>

Not being an expert on stills I would have thought that was quite good. The
maximum ethanol content you can get from a mixture of water and fermented
alcohol is 95% and I think that requires a good fractionating column. The
other reason for a higher water content is continued  boiling after the
bulk of the ethanol has gone  and the boiling temperature rises.

>
> The energy content at 20% water is not great to begin with and when there
> is more of it the stove's cooking power becomes ever-more hopeless.  So the
> first question is why sell water as fuel in the first place?
>

Because the cost of production goes up I guess.

>
>
> Next is the expectation that ethanol is "a clean fuel". This silly talk
> has been going on for longer than most stove makers might realise. Some of
> the worst stoves are those thrown together in a garage burning ethanol or
> ethanol gel with attendant claims that because " the fuel is clean" the
> emissions are "safe".
>
> Your story about the CO is not unusual at all. It is easy to create CO
> with ethanol.
>

 If CO is produced I would expect aldehyde also to be present, this is far
more likely to give a headache whether breathed in or as the body oxidises
alcohol in the blood.

Andrew
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