Entries by Kim Still

Clean Burning with Metering and Mixing

Primary air usually controls the rate of reactions: How fast the solid biomass changes into wood gas. Jets of primary air into the charcoal beneath the biomass add mixing while raising temperatures. Secondary air jets into the side of the flame can also supply needed mixing but tend to lower temperatures. Metering the gas supply […]

Pot Skirts – basic theory

Dr. Sam Baldwin describes the use of a pot skirt in his book “Biomass Stoves: Engineering Design, Development, and Dissemination (1987).” Changes in the length and diameter of the channel gap (between the pot and the interior of the skirt) result in dramatic changes in heat transfer efficiency. “In fact, the channel efficiency, defined as […]

Happy Holidays, 2023!

That the days are shorter is easy to attest to here at Blue Mountain. Our campus is wedged between parallel rows of 100-foot tall Fir trees. Yesterday, the rare sun fell down below the celestial horizon at 2PM.  We envy the valley farmers whose day lasts until around five. On the other hand, being surrounded […]

Updating a 9-year-old “Clean Combustion” YouTube Video

The great and upsetting thing about YouTube videos is that they don’t go away! A lot of this old video now seems incomplete: Our understanding of how to come closer to complete combustion has changed and includes details missing before. The following describes a hopefully less wrong set of design principles. David Evitt is currently deep […]

Aprovecho Announced as a Winner of the Wood Heater Design Challenge

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Alliance for Green Heat, today announced the winning teams for the Wood Heater Design Challenge (WHDC).  Aprovecho Research Center, from Cottage Grove, Oregon, came in second place and won $25,000 with a novel burn pot, airflow configuration, and sensor package for pellet heaters. […]

Biochar Goals

A few years ago, on another series of hot summer days, Aprovecho hosted a seminar on biochar. About twenty enthusiasts from all over the US joined us for a biochar summer camp, lighting a lot of stoves and scaring the safety advisors. We needed more spark screens. At the closing event, we created a list […]

H.R.6316 – Clean Cooking Support Act

Following the COP26 international climate conference, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), have introduced a bill to accelerate access to clean cooking. Here is the opening text of the section defining the activities directed in the bill. H.R.6316 has been referred to the Subcommittee on Energy: SEC. 5. CLEAN COOKING PROGRAM. (a) Department Of […]

A Short History of Cookstove Durability

The Problem with Metal It’s great to start making stoves and testing ideas with tincanium (cut up tin cans). Making new prototypes from tin cans is a quick, inexpensive way to start the design process but tin cans only last for a limited amount of time, depending on the temperature of the combustion chamber. At […]

Predictive Testing of Cars and Wood Stoves

Written decades ago, the lab based tests for both biomass heating and cooking stoves were designed to achieve statistical validity by controlling variables. Because many real world variables were removed from the heating and cooking stove protocols, the results were known not to predict real world performance. Automobiles are currently tested on a dynamometer instead […]