[Gasification] Find truth about Re: [Stoves] Turbo-Cocina, turbo-cooker Wins Prize for Clean Burning

[Bob Stuart]

On 4-Dec-07, at 12:34 PM, Paul S. Anderson wrote:

> Dear Stovers and Gas-L readers,
>
> We recently received info including the following:  (snipped)
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>> www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/turbo-cooker.php
>
> I read the Spanish interview.  Journalism without much science.  No  
> real
> explanation (except the above statement about lower temperature
> combustion). Nunez claims   96% reduction of fuel compared with
> traditional stoves.     When
> asked if he is a genius, he admits that he is.
>
> Lack of clarity or explanations raise doubts about how this won a  
> UN prize and
> funding and patent.
>
> I was reading and looking for clues about gasification (not mentioned
> directly).
> I doubt that it is TLUD pyrolytic gasification (which cannot reach  
> 96% fuel
> reduction as far as I can tell.)  Tom Reed also used the name  
> "Turbo" stove
> years ago, but no evidence of links there.
>
> He states at least two years (maybe more) work on this, lost his  
> marriage and
> money.  Several names of people (none that I recognized).  And yet  
> we have not
> heard of him before this (or does some one know him or his work?).
>
> I am in India with very limited computer access.  If someone else  
> would please
> track down this technology, please post for me and others to read.
>
> If real, then we can all get behind him and assist.  If not real,  
> he is
> spoiling
> the opportunities for real work to be recognized and funded.  Another
> perpetual
> motion machine (or a 96% fuel reduction device) that does not work  
> is bad news
> for all of us.

I hope somebody else can turn up the patent and give us a synopsis.   
 From my surfing, the memorable data are the need for mains power for  
the fan, and the price of $350 for pilot production versions.   
Unfortunately, Mr. Nunez seems to be keen to recover his investment,  
but not to form partnerships.  One article contrasted his stove to a  
burning ring of sticks, lacking even a stone fire ring and pot  
support, which may be the basis for a claim about 96% less fuel being  
used.  His dismissal of ceramics may also be a liability.  If I were  
working on a stove, I might start with a clay chiminea to provide  
draft for boiling water, and a manual bellows operated by  foot for  
open-top cooking, if a chimney from floor to counter height was not  
sufficient.

Best,
Bob Stuart

A Salvadoran wanted to help the environment and his country's poor.  
Instead, his acclaimed invention has cost him his family and savings.
By Marla Dickerson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 28, 2007
SAN SALVADOR -- In a makeshift laboratory equipped with little more  
than a battered chair and a cheap kitchen scale, inventor Rene Nuñez  
Suarez displays the contraption that has become his life's obsession.

It's a stainless-steel cooker that uses about 95% less fuel than  
conventional wood stoves, with minimal pollution. It would seem to be  
a can't-miss technology in a country where millions still cook with  
wood and most forests have been destroyed.

The device has garnered Nuñez a prestigious environmental prize. It  
has earned him a U.S. patent. And it has won fans among some  
Salvadoran peasants who no longer spend a good chunk of their days  
hunting for firewood and the rest inhaling cooking smoke.

It has also wrecked Nuñez's marriage, alienated two of his three  
children and swallowed his life savings. At 61, he lives with his  
mother to save on rent and drives a 1990 Kia. Nuñez knows some people  
think he's a fool to have poured $2.5 million of his and his family's  
money into his project with little to show for it.

"My ex-wife said: 'Man, you are an idiot. Poor people have no money.  
They are not going to buy your stoves,' " he said. "She was right."

Nuñez gambled that the government or nonprofit groups would finance  
production of the appliances to distribute to low-income people. But  
Salvadoran officials so far have shown scant interest in his  
invention. Environmental groups have offered praise but little  
financial backing.

Nuñez wonders if he'd get more respect if he hailed from Silicon  
Valley instead of this tiny Central American nation, where he toils  
in obscurity at a small private university in the capital. His  
"Advanced Combustion Laboratory of Menlo Park" -- he named it in  
honor of Thomas Edison -- is a converted storeroom fitted with a  
single fluorescent bulb. His annual budget is $10,000. Still, he  
perseveres.

Nuñez is convinced that his combustion method can save trees and  
reduce greenhouse gases. He figures the technology can be adapted to  
any fuel and put to industrial uses such as electricity generation.  
But saving the planet has become secondary to a more personal quest:  
winning back the love of his kids.

"If I could eliminate those emissions, then my children would be  
proud of me," Nuñez said. "That became the main motive of my  
invention. To let them know that I was right."



Nuñez married into one of the most powerful families in El Salvador,  
for whose business he designed industrial equipment. They helped him  
start his own small business building computer voltage regulators and  
power supplies. He drove a Range Rover and piloted a Piper Dakota  
plane. Why risk it all on a stove for the poor?

Intellectual curiosity is part of it. So are hubris and naivete. Then  
there are the words of the eccentric 20th century inventor Nikola  
Tesla, one of Nuñez's idols: "Science is but a perversion of itself  
unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity."

It all started in the mid-1990s when a friend asked Nuñez to write a  
chapter on energy resources for a book about El Salvador's natural  
history. A voracious reader and compulsive tinkerer, Nuñez said he  
was stunned to find that 65% of his nation's 7 million people relied  
on wood for fuel.

In fact, half the planet cooks and heats much the way their ancestors  
did using solid fuels, according to the World Resources Institute, a  
Washington-based environmental think tank.

The environmental and health costs are staggering. Indoor pollution  
from cooking fires kills an estimated 1.6 million people a year  
worldwide, mostly women and children. Deforestation is a major source  
of carbon emissions and exacerbates both flooding and drought. The  
problem is particularly acute in El Salvador, where the nation's  
primary watershed is threatened by deforestation.

For Nuñez, a tall, aristocratic-looking engineer who speaks English  
with a vaguely British accent acquired during his student days in  
northern England, it all seemed an appalling waste.

"I thought: 'Well, if we don't fix that, we are going to convert this  
country into a complete desert,' " he said.

Petroleum-poor El Salvador has no ready replacement for wood. What  
was needed, Nuñez reasoned, was an ultra-efficient wood-burning  
cooker. Environmental groups have been pushing such projects for  
decades. Most involve the use of low-cost insulating materials such  
as mud or ceramic.

Nuñez dismisses these as "stone-age" technologies. He surmised that  
the key was a more efficient combustion chamber to get the  
combination of air, fuel and temperature just right. With the  
computer electronics business fast migrating to China, he decided to  
ditch that enterprise and reinvent his company to produce high-tech  
wood stoves.

Never mind that his wife wasn't crazy about the idea and the couple  
had three kids to support. Or that Nuñez knew little about  
combustion. With the help of textbooks and countless experiments, he  
slowly taught himself and his 10 employees.

Ingenuity runs in the family. Nuñez's 92-year-old father, Ernesto, is  
a former surgeon who designed some of his own medical instruments.

"Rene always had a spirit for invention, moved by curiosity about  
things," Ernesto said.

Longtime friend Janet Parr, a Brit who met Nuñez when he was studying  
at the University of Salford, remembers that the Central American was  
eager to try chopsticks for the first time. She described him as fun- 
loving and warm, yet relentless when pursuing a goal.


"He is a very stubborn and difficult man," she said. "He'll do it his  
way or not at all."

Nuñez's early efforts flopped. An aluminum version of the stove  
melted into a smoldering heap. In 1997 he came up with a working  
prototype he dubbed the Turbococina, or Turbostove. He would spend  
years perfecting it.

The device consists of a metal work table fitted with two 6-inch- 
high, 6-inch-wide stainless steel cylinders, spaced about a foot  
apart and rigged with air injectors and electric fans underneath.  
Finger-sized slivers of wood are fed into small openings in the sides  
of the cylinders. Pots and pans balance on top of these metal silos,  
which are essentially raised burners.

At first glance, the cooker looks like a crude science fair entry.  
Nuñez can't be bothered with aesthetics. He said his stove was really  
a "reactor" and that its beauty lay within. The peak temperature in  
the combustion chamber is about 970 degrees Celsius. He said that was  
500 to 600 degrees cooler than that of some industrial combustion  
processes. The lower temperature saves on fuel and reduces emissions.  
But he won't give specifics on how he managed it. "That's my secret,"  
he said, the smile retreating from his face. "It cost me blood and  
suffering to make that stove. . . . I don't want anyone stealing my  
idea."

Nuñez said the Turbococina used 95% less fuel than a typical wood  
stove. Testing at a Canadian lab showed that emissions of carbon  
monoxide and nitrogen oxide were negligible, he added. Bill Pearson,  
a research engineer who did the testing, said the Turbococina showed  
"impressive" energy efficiency. He could not recall that it was  
tested for emissions, though he said it produced very little visible  
smoke.

San Salvador environmental economist Diego Salcedo said the stove  
represented a significant advance. He has been trying to help Nuñez  
land funding for large-scale production of the Turbococina, so far  
with no success. He said El Salvador's poor reputation in scientific  
circles hadn't helped.

"There is always disbelief," Salcedo said. "They think: 'How could a  
Salvadoran have invented something so wonderful?' "

All Adelina Erazo knows is that the Turbococina means less time  
scavenging for fuel and more money in her pocket. The 33-year-old  
widow, who lives in the countryside east of the capital, said she no  
longer rose before dawn to make the 12-mile trek to forage for wood.  
That leaves more time to care for her three young girls and to earn  
money selling her thick, chewy Salvadoran-style tortillas. The girls  
are coughing less. Meals can be prepared more quickly.

She got the stove two years ago, courtesy of a nonprofit that paid  
for some field testing of the appliance. Bustling about her dirt- 
floor kitchen preparing lunch on the device, Erazo said the cooker  
wasn't perfect. She wishes it had three burners instead of two. She  
said pots could topple from the cylinders if she was not careful. And  
when the electricity goes out, she can't use the Turbococina because  
it needs the fans to move air into the combustion chambers.

Still, she said there was no question that it had made her life  
easier. She pointed with satisfaction at a heap of tree limbs piled  
outside her rickety dwelling, a windfall from a storm. She figured  
that supply might last 10 months -- if she didn't get robbed. Wood  
has gotten so expensive and scarce in her area that people steal it  
from one another.

"It's an endless struggle," she said of the quest for fire.



In 2002, the Paris-based International Energy Agency, through its  
Climate Technology Initiative, awarded Nuñez its Climate Technology  
Leadership Award for his invention. He received U.S. Patent No.  
6,651,645 B1 the following year. But financial success has eluded him.

Green groups aren't lining up like he thought they would to fund his  
technology. He has won occasional grants to manufacture a few stoves  
for poor families such as the Erazos. A contractor makes them for him  
for $325. His own company can't do it because he no longer has a  
company or employees. Nuñez is broke.

He said his ex-wife, who declined to be interviewed for this article,  
took most of the couple's assets as part of a bitter divorce prompted  
by his obsession with the Turbococina. A friend pulled some strings  
to get him a research post at the Universidad Francisco Gavidia after  
he exhausted his personal savings on the stove. Nuñez said his  
daughter and oldest son had broken ties with him because they  
believed he sacrificed family and fortune for a quixotic dream.

"They think I'm crazy," he said softly. "I have to show them that I'm  
successful before they'll talk to me again."

His middle child, Mauricio, remains devoted. The 27-year-old finance  
administrator said Nuñez was a loving, patient father who came up  
with his own method to teach Mauricio to read before he went to  
kindergarten. Now living in Germany, Mauricio said he was sure his  
dad had developed something significant. But he said Nuñez had lost  
so much to his own invention that he had become paralyzed in the  
commercialization effort, unsure of whom to trust and fearful of  
blowing his one shot at redemption.

Even admirers say Nuñez's cautiousness is largely to blame for the  
fact that his cooker is still locked in the lab. American  
environmental consultant Lilia Abron, who promotes green technology  
in the developing world, said she could sell plenty of Turbococinas  
if Nuñez would just get them into mass production.

She traveled to El Salvador to view a prototype last year and was  
thrilled with the stove's efficiency and minimal smoke. She said she  
urged the inventor to hook up with a major appliance manufacturer to  
lower the cost, but to no avail.

"The market is there," said an exasperated Abron, a chemical engineer  
and founder of Washington-based Peer Consultants. "He just won't let  
it go."

Nuñez remains wary. He said he had come up with a natural gas version  
of the Turbococina that had huge commercial potential. But he has no  
money for full-scale testing, and prospective partners are asking for  
too big a share of his invention.

Parr said she wasn't sure if her old friend would ever recoup what he  
had invested.

"He has lost his wife and his children," she said. "He has paid a  
really high price."

marla.dickerson at latimes.com

Times staff writer Alex Renderos contributed to this report.