ARC SUMMER STOVE CAMP 2014
Aprovecho’s Summer Stove Camp is back! This is an opportunity to conduct lots of emissions testing of stoves “under the hood” in the lab and in a Test Kitchen. The best Top Lit Up Draft stove team wins $250!!
Dr. TLUD will be leading workshops and sharing the current state-of-the-art of natural draft and forced-air TLUDs. A second course of study will focus on building improved ovens. Teams will build both low mass rocket ovens and high mass ovens and compare performance.
Stove Camp is open to everyone, and is regularly attended by – designers, producers, program implementers/administrators, folks interested in environmental issues, women’s advocates, student interns, and some amazing inventors. We all share the goal of serving humanity – particularly in the developing world – by finding viable solutions.
Stove Camp encourages participants, and shows them how, to solve stove problems. One year NASA participated and we combined emissions equipment to do experiments on Black Carbon. Working with GIZ the participants at Stove Camp 2012 revisited and did further exploration and analysis of charcoal stoves. Folks have open access to the emissions hoods and sometimes spend the whole week tuning their stove.
Tuition is $400, and people have the option of camping out by the river at our new beautiful campus at Blue Mountain or choosing one of several affordable motels in the small, Oregon town of Cottage Grove.
Stove Camp is unusual because there are unique kinds of learning opportunities all around you.
We expect a large turnout this year, so please reserve a spot as the window for reservation placement is nearly at an end!
Patterns for Combustion Chambers
The well-known TLUD (Top Lit Up Draft) stove follows one of the three patterns normally used for burning wood. In fact, top lighting of a batch of wood has been known for centuries to decrease smoke from a fire. If the entire top of the batch of wood is burning the smoke and gases have to rise up into the flame and most of them are combusted.
The pattern that Dr. Winiarski likes best is probably the Down Draft Down Feed technique (DDDF). The sticks of wood are lit at the bottom and the flame is pulled into the stove horizontally. As the sticks burn their weight pushes the stick down and the fire can be self-feeding. The Down Draft Down Feed pattern can be clean burning when the tips of the sticks are burning and the metering of the fuel is controlled (as in a pellet stove).
Of course, most people feed sticks of wood horizontally into the fire. This is called Side Feed (SF). The Side Feed technique can also be clean burning when about three inches of the tip of the sticks are burning. The gas and smoke then naturally rise up into the flame. But when more of the stick is burning too much gas and smoke is produced and then escapes outside the flame.
