Design, Construction and Testing of an Improved Wood Stove

Abstract

The design, construction and testing of an improved wood stove is undertaken in this work. The design improvement of the stove focused on the following areas: provision of insulation around the combustion chamber to reduce conduction heat loss across the walls of the chamber, incorporation of smoke rings at the top of the stove, provision of sizable and adjustable air inlet to ensure the availability of sufficient air for the complete combustion of the fuel wood, and the incorporation of chimney to convey flue gases away from the place of use. Performance test results show that the wood stove has a maximum thermal efficiency of 64.4% and power delivery of 2.52kW, but a minimum specific fuel consumption of 0.447. This indicates a better performance when compared to the average thermal efficiency value of 17.9% for traditional mud stove as reported by George (1997), or the Kilakala stove which has a fuel saving capacity of 30% (Crewe 1990, Otiti 1991). The performance is also better when compared to the Improved Vented Mud stove (IVM) which has the average thermal efficiency values across fuels that vary from 10% to 23% which is comparable with the range of 10.8% to 19.6% reported by Pal and Joshi (1989). On smokiness, it was observed that virtually all the flue gases were conveyed out of the test area through the chimney.