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The beauty of the TChar (like Paul Anderson explained in his mail last week) is that you create your own char in the TLUD combustion chamber placed on top of a charcoal stove. When you lift up the gasifier-top the glowing embers fall by gravity into the charcoal stove, if you have bigger chunks, you tap them down with a stick, so no need to be 'breaking' apart charred pieces. They normally break by themselves.
I am not quite sure what you mean by if it would be better to have 'a charcoal gasifier down there'? the bottom of the TChar that I had brought is a double walled charcoal stove with preheated secondary air going in above the glowing char (see photos below)
I should also put the record straight, where that stove came from: it was from the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), made by local artisans in the city of Butembo in Eastern Congo based on the initiative of the organisation IFDC (International Fertilizer Development Centre). They deal with the entire value chain of wood from planting, to processing into fuel and its use in improved cookstoves within the programme 'Sustainable Energy from Woodlots' implemented in Eastern Congo (south and north Kivu), Rwanda and Burundi. IFDC started a fruitful cooperation with GIZ on improved stoves in Burundi last year and I had the chance to work with them since earlier this year.
One of the colleagues from Butembo, Anselme Vwambale, took a prototype of a TChar from Malawi to DRC in March this year, and two months later I found tinsmiths in Butembo who were making TChar-stoves that function much better than what we had gotten to in Malawi. That is why the stove is called the 'Butembo Stove'. It has two versions, one all- metal version and another one where the charcoal bottom has a ceramic liner.
From IFDC, Anselme and AImé Kikuru (who is in charge of the value chain development in DRC) attended the recent stove camp at Aprovecho, as IFDC plans to scale up their stove interventions in the region. The colleague from GIZ Burundi was also there!
At Aprovecho Stove Camp we divided in groups and my group did a couple of iterations on that all-metal charcoal-bottom, playing around with the secondary air and the group got awarded the Cat Pee Award for that. It is really amazing what that tiny little metal unit was able to do. The photos show the tiny unit heating up the 5 l of water in a big pot, the photo to the right shows the inside of the combustion chambe at the stage when we had two rows of big secondary air holes. that did not work so well. we got the best performance from the 5 tests we were able to do, once we reduced the hole-size to half. the stove camp was over...
But the applied research will continue in Butembo and elsewhere.
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Results and more pics will be included in the report by Aprovecho on the Stove Camp.
Regards Christa Am 13.08.2012 um 20:37 schrieb Kobus Venter:
Dean and list,What kind of wood fuel was used? Suppose the results and pics are posted somewhere? The pyrolised particle size that ends up in the charcoal burner is crucial in my opinion. Charring Legacy biomass briquettes and then breaking it up into equal sized pieces may just give the best flow rate and... preserve the forests and really get my vote! Would it not be better if it was a charcoal gasifier down there?Regards Kobus<Christa Roth brought a TLUD that burned the wood and then burned up the made charcoal.www.vuthisa.com Twitter: @vuthisa Facebook: www.facebook.com/Vuthisa LinkedIn: http://za.linkedin.com/in/vuthisa
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