[Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s

[Julien Winter]

Hi  Norbert, Alex and Norm;

It would seem that Richard Hill's furnace does not have a history with
furnaces, but it did influence small stoves in a big way.   There seems to
be a parallel with TLUDs that were first introduced as forced draft stoves,
but people needed them as natural draft stoves (notwithstanding the
independent discovery of Paal Wendelbo in Norway)

That old Russian book from 1911 is very interesting.  It's good to discover
these old nuggets.  The physics of downdraft is useful to me, because it
helps me to explain the even laminar flow in what I call a
'counter-current' TLUD burner.  That burner tries to achieve a high
temperature flame on top of the char.  There is an old video of it here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzYUzJPM3eQ  Simple designs are good, but
even this one is too much for Bangladesh where they prefer to use the
concentrator ring burner of Paal and Paul Anderson, because it is very easy
to make and forgiving to use.

Cheers,
Julien.



On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 11:13 PM Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Folks;
>
> It is good to hear that Dick Hill had so many friends.  I am not
> surprised, because I dug up a little history on him.  He died in 2016 at
> the age of 97.  The  Bangalore News published a short biography.  I have
> attached it.  He was quite a dynamo.  His generation was the same as my
> dad, and they lived through some big World events.  My generation has had a
> relatively quiet time.  Not so for the younger generations that will spend
> their working lives in the upcoming decades.
>
> Cheers
> Julien
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 8:18 PM Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folk;
>>
>> Richard Hill patented his stove in 1981.  Vertical Feed Stick Wood Fuel
>> Burning Furnace System.  US Patent 4,473,351.   The patent was assigned to
>> the University of Maine.
>> https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/4473351
>>
>> Besides referencing a 1944 patent using a vertical stack of wood fuel,
>> there is no reference in Hill's patent to any prior art that burned stick
>> wood only at the bottom.
>>
>> There were attempts to commercialize the stove, and they are described in
>> this Wikipedia article:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetstream_furnace
>>
>> The first company went bankrupt because they over-spent  their financial
>> capital on North American promotion.   Howerever, the stove didn't seem to
>> succeed in the long run.  I suspect that was because of their inclusion of
>> a water heating system and dependence on electricity made the stove too
>> complicated for the market.  Oil-fired furnaces were easier to use.
>>
>> If they had a natural draft, hot air furnace, history shows that they
>> would have succeeded.  That was what got me and our neighbors excited about
>> the Harrowsmith article (in the previous email).  In the 1970s, there were
>> still a number of historic farmhouses that heated using a wood fueled
>> convection furnace.  They looked like a huge octopus in the basement.  We
>> had a regular schedule of taking down the flue to clean out the creosote.
>> All the same, the occasional house was lost to a chimney fire.  We were
>> swimming in wood fuel, and every spring we had to clear the farm fields of
>> dead-falls.  We were always worried that our 150-yr-old farmhouse would
>> burn down.
>>
>> Richard Hill's contribution to biomass combustion seems to have been
>> forgotten.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Julien
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 10:15 PM Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi folks;
>>>
>>> When I got involved with TLUD stoves back in 2012, I also saw rocket
>>> stoves, I knew I was looking at something familiar.  This has been bugging
>>> me ever since, and I had to go back to see if my memory was right.
>>>
>>> Through the 1970s and 1980s, my family had a cow collection in Eastern
>>> Ontario, Canada.  We used to subscribe to a country living magazine called
>>> "Harrowsmith." Every month, we would read the magazine from cover to
>>> cover.  One issue in 1980 described a new stove that was developed at the
>>> University of Maine in the 1970s, and commercialized in Prince Edward
>>> Island, Canada.
>>>
>>> Mariner, R. 1980.  "Superfurnace: It Walks, It Talks, It Crawls on Its
>>> Belly Like a Reptile …"  Harrowsmith, number 27, volume 7, April 1980
>>>
>>> What a name for an article!   I have attached a copy.   I discovered
>>> that there are devoted fans of Harrowsmith that have kept all their old
>>> copies, and they have a Facebook page.  If you have a vague recollection of
>>> an article, they will start sleuthing for it, then post photos of the pages
>>> on Facebook.  That was a lot more efficient for me than driving to Trent
>>> University to look through microfiche film.
>>>
>>> Back in 1980, I wanted to build one of these stoves, but I ended up
>>> going to graduate school.
>>>
>>> The stove was based on the research that is reported here,
>>> Hill, RC 1979 Design, Construction and Performance of Stick-Wood Fired
>>> Furnace for Residential and Small Commercial Application US Department of
>>> Energy, EC 77-S-02-45. 30 p.
>>>
>>> Hill's stove was a forced draft stove, but in principle, he had designed
>>> what we now call a rocket stove.  It has primary air burning char and
>>> pyrolyzing wood, with gases burning up stream.  The wood is preheated and
>>> dried before it starts to burn.  The article says that you can virtually
>>> burn green wood.
>>>
>>> You can find a copy of Hill's bulletin on-line, and I think Bioenergy
>>> Lists has a copy.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Julien.
>>> --
>>> Julien Winter
>>> Cobourg, ON, CANADA
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Julien Winter
>> Cobourg, ON, CANADA
>>
>
>
> --
> Julien Winter
> Cobourg, ON, CANADA
>


-- 
Julien Winter
Cobourg, ON, CANADA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20240225/608a5793/attachment.html>