Cookstove.Net

Website Links

Description

In other pages of this website we have tried to develop a level of understanding of stoves - be they the traditional open fire or what are known as improved stoves - based on a mixture of theoretical models and laboratory experimentation. These form the basis on which new designs of stoves suited to diverse situations that arise in practice could be worked out. Since this understanding cannot be considered foolproof , one ought to have a satisfactory procedure for assessing the performance of a design. While we have discussed the various experimental techniques elsewhere, these were done primarily with a view to understand the processes in a cookstove and thus useful for research situations in a reasonably well-equipped laboratory. But cookstoves have to be used in kitchens operated not necessarily by research engineers with plenty of time and facilities. Thus designs need to take these into consideration explicitly. The difference between the laboratory situation and a practical situation has often been posed in such a manner as to suggest that the laboratory work cannot provide any guidelines for the development of efficient stoves. It is claimed that only field work can lead to practical designs. Our aim is here to reconcile these two world views and show both types of work are essential for developing successful designs. Over the years many testing procedures have been suggested, all of them claiming to be the best way to establish the performance of a stove, and trying to express that performance by a single number usually referred to as ``the efficiency''. But the system of a woodburning cookstove is too complex to be captured by one number. The components of the system are the operator, the fuel, the pan-stove combination, and the food to be cooked. Each component has its input to the system and influences the result. So performing tests on the whole system is very complex and will produce results that are very difficult to interpret. A better approach then is to test parts of the system and try to combine them to produce results applicable for the whole system. The first component that is sacrificed is the operator. She/he is replaced by a precisely described procedure of feeding the fuel into the stove. The second sacrifice is the food to be cooked. This is replaced by water. The real food-cooking tests are limited to a validation of the results obtained by water-boiling tests. This leaves us with the system of fuel and pan-stove combination. How can we express the performance of this system in comprehensible terms? A natural question in this connection is what do we mean by performance of a stove? We use the word to denote collectively:

Companies nearby