ENERGY
Development of Wood Stoves

It was found that the dimensional features of a woodstove are of paramount importance in establishing its efficiency. Besides, the presence of a grate in woodstoves makes the burning of wood easier The cooking pan creates an enclosed space, and the gases are let out through a stack, thus, doing away with the problem of smoke without altering the thermal efficiency.
The development of a woodstove which incorporates these features would have a significant effect on a large segment of the rural population, which continue to use wood and twigs for fuel.
KSCST initiated a project with the objectives of developing woodstoves which would not require drastically different cooking practices compared to the practice with traditional stoves, will have a thermal efficiency much higher than 30% (compared to the less than 10% efficiency of traditional stoves) will be smokeless, and amongst other things promote the utilisation of local materials to keep the cost low.
The present cookstove is ideal for this two stage process of cooking The first stage involves the raising of the temperature of food in the cooking vessel to boiling point. The second stage being with the stoppage of wood burning and the supply of stored heat from the stove body to maintain the temperature of the cooking food near its boiling point.
Experiments, using this method, have shown that as low as 60 to 80 grams of fuelwood are required , for obtaining 1 kgm of cooked food, as compared to 300 to 500 gms needed for good quality traditional stoves.



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