[Stoves] Understanding "charcoal making" stoves. Was:energy lost in charcoal makinag and briquetting

[Kevin Chisholm]

Dear Paul
...del...
>
> To Kevin: I flatly reject the idea that all stoves are gasifiers.

I will bet you a box of beer that you cannot have any stove that does not 
gasify the wood.:-)

 All biomass
> burning stoves do involve the gasification processes to turn solid wood 
> into
> combustible gases,

EXACTLY!

> but the "gasifiers" are the stoves that separate the gas
> creation from the gas combustion,

I would suggest that a "stove" purposefully burns gas to completion, while a 
"gasifier" attempts to minimize burning until the gas is delivered to 
another device for utilization.. We seem to have a number of different 
people holding different views on what a "gasifier" is. The gasifier 
definition seems to be rather fluid, and changes to suit the desired 
application. We now have the concept of a "flaccid flame" as one of the 
criteria..

AND have some control over both creation and
> combustion.

In a "gasifier", there is the production of "gas". In a "stove", there is 
"combustion."

  The "Burn-barrel demo" and the Karve-Larson charcoal
> making stoves
> do not have that control,

They employ gasification to get a desired job done.

and to call them "gasifiers" would diminish the
> descriptive value of all gasifiers.

Doug Williams builds gasifiers. Calling a T-LUD stove a "gasifier" certainly 
diminishes what Doug does.

A major difference between stoves and gasifiers is that gasifiers do not 
employ secondary air, and their purpose is to produce a gas for use 
elsewhere. A stove or a "combustion device" always has secondary ai; 
otherwise, the fuel could not burn to completion. I would suggest that if 
device has provision for secondary air, then it is a stove. If it is built 
without provision for secondary air, then it is a gasifier.

Would you agree that if Tom Reed built his wood gas stove without any 
provision for secondary air, that it would then be T-LUD gasifier? Would you 
agree that if he added the capability for provision of the right amount of 
secondary air, that it would then become a T-LUD stove?

Rather than take specific pieces of hardware, and work back to defining 
them, don't you think it would be better to develop the defining criteria 
first, and then let the defining criteria determine the label that would be 
fairly applied to the system being evaluated?

Best wishes,

Kevin
>
> Paul
>
>
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