Video: Cooking with Sticks on a Natural Draft TLUD

In this short video, Jon & Flip Anderson make pumpkin soup on the natural draft TLUD, burning sticks rather than pellets

For the past couple of years, ARC has been experimenting with shorter, natural draft TLUDs without concentrator rings and risers. The idea has been:

1. Create short, choppy flames replacing vertical, laminar columns of flame.
2. Don’t let flame touch the “cold” (100C) pot where it is quenched and makes smoke.
3. Provide enough residence time, slowing velocity by increasing the interior diameter, to assist this process.

For close to complete combustion to occur, a molecule of oxygen has to join with another molecule of wood gas. Oxygen has a hard time entering a column of flame, so we prefer to see short, choppy, thin flames that hopefully allow a greater amount of mixing to occur.

Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer made a nice looking metal prototype that we have been experimenting with for a year or so, here in the lab. We recently switched from burning pellets to using vertical sticks as fuel.

Why use hard to find pellets if sticks can be burned as cleanly?

Here are some some short video clips of Jon and Flip burning vertical sticks while making delicious pumpkin soup yesterday at the lab. They have found various ways to cleanly light and burn sticks from the forest and are teaching us what they are learning. The goal is to iterate changes in the TLUD to learn how vertical sticks can cook food and maybe find an alternative to burning charcoal and pellets.