Modeling Combustion: Math and Experience

Testing stoves means that many, many hours are spent watching the flames and pushing sticks of wood into the fire. We watch the real time emissions, water temperature, excess air, and temperatures in the combustion chamber on a computer screen as the testing continues. After hundreds of hours it becomes obvious that clean combustion has a certain “look.” For instance, when there is a lot of flame above the sticks the real time CO goes down on the computer screen. Without flame above the fuel, the gas rises up and is not combusted. That’s why charcoal can be dangerous, because burning charcoal does not create a lot of flame above the fuel.

When the wood sticks are changed into charcoal, the PM2.5 is dramatically reduced, as well. Pushing the unburned sticks into the fire creates smoke. Pushing the sticks in quickly makes a lot of smoke and pushing the sticks in slowly makes less smoke. Charcoal does not make much smoke and that’s one of the reasons that people like cooking with it. Feeding a fire is a compromise, as firepower and PM2.5 tend to rise together. A rocket stove can look OK as long as the sticks are fed slowly into the fire at less than about 2.5 kW. But at high power, Rockets start to smoke like crazy.

How can these two experiences be factored into a mathematical model of combustion? By using a video camera hooked up to a computer program? Residence time and temperature are easily measured, but the extent that turbulence occurs is not easily quantified. Engineers get past these sorts of problems by figuring out how to optimize mixing (using jets of air, for example), but a mathematical model is more easily filled in with numbers for other sorts of phenomena, such as the excess air ratio.

Both experiments and mathematical modeling shed light on how to make better stoves and hopefully complement each other. Arguments have been known to happen. I have been trying to figure out how to make clean burning biomass fires since 1989, and one thing has not changed since Dr. Winiarski started me on this path. I continue to be happier trying to answer questions that begin with the word “What” instead of “Why.”