[Stoves] Spherical Cow Dung Balls for ND-TLUDs in Bangladesh : Dung is very do-able

[Richard Stanley]

“A lot of room”:  Good one.
One fine point though:  the fibrous ganglia remaining after the leachate is filtered out of the dung, is not so much “sticky” as it is entangling, much like matted hair. In a random arrangement of such fibers —blended  with specific proportions of combustible infillers such as a combination with — or in some cases singular use —of such other practically available combustible residues as waste pulped paper, mashy leaves, sawdust, pulverised charcoal crumbs and/or more just other fine combustible fibers,— the fibers tend to interweave and on drying,  interlock the matrix into a relatively durable solid mass , the shape of which, save general parameters for optimising air flow, density and ease of production, pretty much up to you.
And it doesn’t take much room !
Richard, Ashland Oregon, US part of the Americas
Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 4, 2018, at 10:29 AM, Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nikhiil;

You raise some good points about academic debates on manure for fertilizer vs. fuel, and that many technology interventions didn't succeed.

You are right that context is very important.  People don't burn cow dung out of choice.  They would prefer wood.  Burning low density biomass and dung for fuel is a very good indicator of a population that is under energy stress.   Wood supplies about half the biomass energy supply in rural Bangladesh.   The traditional stoves are smoky, but they are appropriate to the situation, because they will burn anything, and cost nothing to build; households are self-sustainable in cooking.   The TLUD is an odd fish.

Myself and colleagues in Bangladesh, are looking for ideas that could work for rural homes in the context of biochar.  The cow dung washing could be a winner, if they don't have to give up cooking time, and if washed dung is capable of binding biomass into balls that burns more cleanly and efficiently than pure dung.   They will start to test the idea any day now.

Making biochar in the Akha TLUD looks like it could be a winner (although it will take about five year to say for certainty).  The cleanliness and 35% wood fuel savings of the TLUD is really appreciated.  The effect of biochar fertilizers on their fertile, but low organic matter soils is quit promising (still being quantified).

If we can leach fertility out of cow dung to make a biochar fertilizer, yet not sacrifice compressed fuel for the TLUD, then I think we have got another winning idea.

The judges of the idea are, of course, the rural people.  If an idea is credible, they will jump on it, and innovate.

On a landscape scale, saving all cow dung to return to the soil will not be sufficient to re-build their soil organic matter.  There just isn't enough manure, and decomposition rates of soil organic matter in the humid tropics is fast.  Saving dung would be important to increase the yield of high-value vegetable crops grown in a limited area.   Adding biochar with dung leachate will build soil organic matter and improve soil quality better than dung alone.

It is a myth that bright ideas just fall into people's minds by mere thinking.  Inspirations are hard to come by.  Inspirations don't arrive in a vacuum.  We are born with 'blank slates' and what we can imagine has a causal connection to our past and present experience (not the least of which is the culture we are born into).   Thus, someone in the World has to has to have the prepared mind, context, motivation and creative nouse to think, "I should wash this manure".   In Kenya, Francis and Mary Kavita had an idea, transmitted it to Richard Stanley, who put it on the Stoves list, and the 'the shit hit the fan'.   One hundred and forty million people living in rural Bangladesh had not thought of that.

Biochar is another example an idea not born in the minds of those in need of the it.  The idea of biochar didn't arrive in the minds of soil scientists studying soil organic matter conservation for fifty or more years (I was one of them).  It arrived to Western scientists via the Amazon.  When someone told soil organic matter scientists that char was stable in soil, they knew the implications immediately.   "Why the heck didn't WE see that?!!!!," they said.  It was a case of great epistemological startlement, better known in the Anglophone world as an ' Oh Shit !!! moment '.

Wash the minerals and nitrogen out of cow manure before you burn it?  "Oh dung !!" 

Lets see how it works.

Cheers,
Julien


-- 
Julien Winter
Cobourg, ON, CANADA
_______________________________________________
Stoves mailing list

to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org

to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org

for more Biomass Cooking Stoves,  News and Information see our web site:
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20181104/ddc3dc69/attachment.html>