Design and Experimental Investigation of a Natural Draft Improved Biomass Cookstove

Volume 8 Issue 3 May - July 2018

Research Paper

Design and Experimental Investigation of a Natural Draft Improved Biomass Cookstove

Vikas Kumar*, Kangkan Jyoti Baishya**, Pankaj Kalita***

* B. Tech Graduate, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

** B. Tech Graduate, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India.

*** Assistant Professor, Centre for Energy, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, India.

Kumar, V., Baishya, K. J., and Kalita, P. (2018). Design and Experimental Investigation of a Natural Draft Improved Biomass Cookstove. i-manager’s Journal on Mechanical Engineering, 8(3), 17-30. https://doi.org/10.26634/jme.8.3.14734

Abstract

Cookstove is one of the oldest technologies in the world and is known since 100,000 BC for preparing food. Due to incomplete and poor combustion in traditional cookstoves, it not only consumes a large amount of fuel, but also emits harmful gases which cause severe health problems. Designing a biomass cookstove is dependent mostly on empirical information and hit and trial method of experimentation, influenced by various thermodynamic and heat transfer calculations, which is costly. The proposition is to design a simple yet efficient natural draft biomass cookstove, which is cheap and affordable for all groups of people and should also accommodate their existing cooking practices along with very little or no emission of harmful gases. The performance parameters will be calculated using simulation, and then if found appropriate, fabrication will be done. In this approach, firstly standard Water Boiling Test on two biomass cookstoves available to the team was conducted and various performance parameters of the same were calculated. After experimentation, various important factors required for designing a biomass cookstove were defined and a natural draft biomass cookstove was designed, and detailed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of the temperature, flame velocity and pressure distribution in the configuration was done using ANSYS Fluent. After the simulation, it was found that the range in which temperature, flame velocity and pressure distribution of the biomass cookstove designed in this research is in good agreement with the results mentioned in literature for free or natural convection. On the basis of results obtained, it was concluded that the design of natural draft improved biomass cookstove is reliable and fabrication of the same will be feasible and will meet the objective set by the team. Here, an idea of the capability of CFD in the field of modelling and analyzing various properties of biomass combustion was known, and it was deduced that ample amount of time and expenses related to experimental investigations can be reduced if CFD is implemented at the proper early stage.