[Stoves] Particles and particle types (was Charcoal Making Stove)

[Tami Bond]

I sent this last night, but it bounced, maybe because I used HTML.
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 Hey Dean,

I don't think that I could answer any of your questions quantitatively. 
Maybe Mark is making a model of this.

> 2A.)Is Turbulence more important than Temperature?
>   
Really can't answer this. If there is no Turbulence (mixing) and 
therefore insufficient oxygen to burn some pockets out, all the 
Temperature in the world will not help. And vice versa: if you 
beautifully mix the exhaust but it's really cold, no reaction can take 
place.
> 3.) Charcoal making stoves have much lower temperatures, almost no
> turbulence (the wood is burning in a coffee can with a few holes punched in
> the bottom and sides) but again CO and PM are lower than in a Rocket. 
I believe this is because you have so little volatile matter remaining, 
that there's just less material to turn into PM. Somebody with a better 
knowledge of charcoal than I should answer this.
> 3A.)Does lazy red flame burn cleaner than yellow vigorous flame?
>   
It's too hard to control *just one* variable to answer this question. I 
don't think you could make a fresh piece of wood burn with a lazy red 
flame, so how would we ever be able to tell whether lazy-red was better 
than vigorous-yellow? Charcoal is in a whole different situation than 
wood. Most of the volatile matter is gone already. Some may be left (as 
Tom said, governed by the temperature of manufacture), but there is not 
a lot of volatile material that's under pressure and just bursting 
(literally) to escape.
> What did you mean by the following?
>
> "Dilution quenches everything. If you're down to 500 C, probably won't do 
> much of anything, so you have to get it at the flame front."
>   
Um, I meant that I couldn't speak or write English.
If you have diluted enough that the exhaust gas has been reduced to 500 
C, no reactions will take place.
I was thinking about gasification. Gasification is nice because you can 
mix the fuel and air before final combustion, so you could have a 
well-defined reaction zone, rather than the sort of haphazard reaction 
zone of a diffusion flame. This is the place to get all the reactants 
consumed. My sloppy sentence was merely saying, 'Why go through the 
trouble of chasing pollutants in the exhaust, when you are unsure of the 
time/temperature/turbulence any given air packet will follow, when you 
have a nice, hot flame front which should be your first line of defense?'

Hope that makes sense.

Tami