Visiting SSM

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New SSM Health/Climate Biomass Heating Stove Buildings

Here is a video I made last week, introducing some of the the new things I saw on my visit to Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer (SSM). I keep on saying in the video (Sorry!) how much I admire Mr. and Mrs. Shen. Mr. Shen is a great engineer who has built the new buildings, installed the machines, and taken the ideas that Dr. Winiarski brought to him and manufactured over five million durable, affordable Rocket stoves. Mrs. Shen runs the business, does HR, sells the stoves, etc. 

An amazing combination! Daughter, Kristina and nephew Chenkai, are being trained to assist the business. You’ll meet the younger generation in the video. Kristina went to the University of Oregon and is now a Vice President at SSM. Chenkai leads a team selling stoves out of his offices in Shenzen.

I walked around new buildings, tested clean burning stoves (including the Jet-Flame and forced draft TLUD) and saw a new wing being built (above) with huge machines to make health/climate biomass heating stoves, a new venture. Since 1976, Aprovecho has helped approximately one hundred stove projects, with SSM becoming the most commercially successful, rolling profits into expanding capacity.

What a joy to visit!

SSM manufactured rocket stoves with fires burning in them

Durability Testing at SSM

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SSM manufactured rocket stoves with fires burning in them
Year-long durability testing with real fires

I just returned to the Oregon lab from a two-week visit to Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer. The next few newsletters will be about SSM and progress made. There’s a lot to talk about! SSM has sold over 5 million stoves and the factory is a wonderful place to visit. 

SSM started testing stoves for durability twenty-four hours a day (three eight hour shifts at a nearby farming community) three years ago. The farmers keep fires going in eight SSM stoves and the tests continue for one year of each stove. That’s 8, 860 hours.

It’s great that SSM has been doing long term, real life testing of their stoves. Previously, tests in a kiln with wet, salted pieces of metal resulted in confusing estimates of durability. In 2017, M.P. Brady and T.J. Theiss shocked the stove world by showing that in a wet, salty, hot kiln even very expensive metals were not long lasting. (Energy for Sustainable Development 37 (2017) 20–32, “Alloy Corrosion Considerations in Low-Cost, Clean Biomass Cookstoves for the Developing World”, Michael P. Brady, et al.).

The SSM testing is being written up. It seems to show much longer durability of various combustion chamber metals when real fires are used. Full details to follow.