Marc Pare, June, 2010

Three friends and I spent last semester at Georgia Tech working on the thermodynamic modeling (and optimization) of cook stoves... I attached a summary of our project and the meat of the analysis section and the Full Report (see the attachments)


TOWARD END-TO-END IMPROVED COOK STOVE OPTIMIZATION
By Marc-Antoine Paré, Matt Redmond, Christopher Beebe, and Nick Kretschmar

While it is possible to build and test the performance of prototype Improved Cook
Stoves without significant capital investment, if the amount of time that it takes to
optimize candidate stove designs could be drastically reduced, then cook stove
technology could reach the hands of many more in developing nations. It was identified
that an end-to-end modeling and optimization effort for Improved Cook Stove (ICS)
design could aid in the development of more efficient and cleaner-burning stoves. The
thermodynamic and heat transfer processes underlying cook stove performance are
tightly coupled, which makes modeling a challenge. The following analysis is a first
attempt at capturing each of the underlying processes of stove performance. The model is
formulated so as to facilitate the optimization of stove geometry. This effort helps
pinpoint the deficiencies of the current state of stove modeling and attempts to
demonstrate the eventual power of a predictive stove model.