Regional Testing and Knowledge Centers ARC just received a grant to hire full time assistance for the Regional Testing and Knowledge Centers (RTKC). Many of the RTKCs use our emission equipment. Jaden has just returned from Tanzania where she was setting up a new lab and Travis is going to Mozambique soon to do the […]
It’s great to have colleagues whose opinions are trusted. Dr. Larry Winiarski was usually right, by which I mean, that when we built and tested his inventions they might not have been perfect but were significant improvements, good starting places for further development. I always appreciated talking to Dr. Tom Reed, inventor of the TLUD, […]
In the middle of August, we had three stoves under development using the three emission hoods (two-forced draft, one natural draft). Sam and Travis built the natural draft hood to help improve heating stoves. Sam is thinking about making another one, number four, since we are working on more heating stoves and things can get […]
Lowering Emissions in a Short, Natural Draft TLUD The great thing about 12” high tincanium natural draft TLUDs is that they are cheap, short and powerful. Dr. Tom Reed had a dream that a billion TLUDs would protect health, save wood, etc. We wondered if an all Tier 4, affordable, stainless steel ND-TLUD might help? […]
A rat proof box When Dr. Larry Winiarski and I lived for a season at Rancho San Nicolas in Baja California Sur, Mexico we wanted to be helpful. We built cook stoves, solar cookers and other delightful inventions that we found interesting. But Larry was an insightful fellow and he started to listen to folks […]
Capacity Building with CSIR Over the past 3 years, thanks to three grants from Fire Capital, Aprovecho has been working with CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) in Ghana to expand their lab capacity. We have focused on teaching stove design principles through co-developing a stove retrofit for boarding schools in Ghana. During the […]
Concentrator disk/chimney in a TLUD When I asked Google AI, “Is flow more laminar in a smaller diameter tube?” it immediately responded: “Yes, thanks for asking! A smaller diameter tube can promote more laminar flow for a given flow rate. This is because reducing the diameter of a tube increases the Reynolds number, which is a dimensionless quantity […]
Photo from TREEAID on Flickr Looking at the photo it is easy to imagine why field-testing is needed to show whether an intervention is actually saving fuel. Real life is complicated and is not replicated in a lab. The use of a Water Boiling Test to determine if new stoves are saving fuel has historically […]
In my opinion, the WBT* cannot be used, especially in the lab, to improve a biomass cook stove because all of the important field variables are not represented. A successful cook stove needs to be evolved from field tests, as we did in Southern India for the Shell Foundation. Cooks in eighteen villages kept on […]
Image from Dr. Paul Anderson’s Introduction to TChar (TLUD) Stoves for Haiti The size of the hole in the middle of the flat plate, usually round, that seals the top of the combustor in a TLUD stove has important functions. The flat plate forces air jets/flame to travel horizontally in an attempt to completely cover […]