Dear Jock
Great picture. Something try: put a fat nail into the smaller holes and twist them to the right to make the hole such that it forces the air to flow right, not straight in. Don't do this for the large holes. The result is a strong tendency to form a vortex which is continuously disrupted by the large jest pointing in, giving great turbulence. The tall pillar of sooty flame you mentioned is caused, ultimately, by the pack of penetrating power of the air entering the holes. If they are larger and fewer, the inrushing air can reach the centre. If the penetration is good, the soot disappears. The idea of allowing secondary to enter is widely known, but good implementations of it are few. The concentration disk somewhat compensates for this lack of penetration but it still has issues (on the same count). There has to be enough draft above the secondary air entry point to pull the secondary air into the middle. Some have realised the problem but not the cause, and added a central hollow pillar with holes in it attempting to get the air into the middle of the gas stream. Again, the disk can help, but it insulates/isolates the fire from the top of the fuel bed which causes additional problems related to maintaining the gasification. It also increases ignition emissions, in my view. Although we speak of a flame burning section above the secondary air entrance, it is not only for burning the gases, it is to provide sufficient draft to get the mixing right. When failing to get the draft right (pushing the flame out to burn against the pot bottom) people have added fans to compensate for the lack of draft. A fan is just a predictable source of draft and you can get the same result with a chimney (section). Regards Crispin
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