One of the great things about working at ARC is that we sometimes get to carve out exactly what we want to accomplish in the next quarter. And there is a certain kind of rural freedom especially during a pandemic that includes rivers and lakes. At a recent planning meeting, we decided to accomplish the following by ETHOS:

Dean Still will finish the 2^nd edition of Clean Burning Cook Stoves with new chapters covering what we have learned in the last five years. He’s also working with Liberator in Missouri to make a forced draft Rocket heating stove to be introduced at ETHOS and assisting SSM to design a one liter, vacuum insulated solar pasteurizer based on affordable double walled drinking bottles made in China.

Sam Bentson is finishing up another summer long experiment with the interns from Oregon State University defining how to reduce exposure to smoke in the Test Kitchen with PM sensors tracking concentrations. How much safer is it to cook outdoors? Sam will tell you in two weeks! The students are also making progress on a robot to replace the human fire operator in ISO stove testing. The LEMS continues to be a valuable resource for cookstove laboratories around the world. The most recent installation included a PEMS with a newly developed portable gravimetric system.

David Evitt has installed oxygen, velocity, and temperature sensors in the EPA SBIR testing set up under the LEMS and is optimizing the Jet-Flame, learning how many standard liters of air best reduce PM2.5 at varying fire powers. He is also able to track excess air and air/fuel ratios with combustion chamber temperatures being shown again to play a determining role in increased combustion efficiency. We expect that by ETHOS (third weekend in January) a lot more will be known about not just the Jet-Flame but combustion in general.

Great way to spend a summer!