Main knowledge bank page | Recent additions | Recent changes | What links here | Categories | Category cloud
How-to guides | Organisation profiles | Project profiles
 

edit this page

Fuel saving cone

Boiling Point
Front cover of Boiling Point issue 32
Issue 32 (1994) Energy for the Household
ArticleFuel saving cone
AuthorF.B. Carleton, A. Tamir, F.J. Weinberg


A simple ceramic cone added to a domestic gas cooker could give fuel savings of up to 40 per cent, according to researchers at Imperial College, London.

Felix Weinberg, Professor of Combustion Physics, says the conventional gas ring is often used very inefficiently. If a saucepan is too small in relation to the ring, the flames flare up around the outside and heat is lost to the atmosphere of the kitchen.

Weinberg and his colleagues decided to try to recapture the heat and direct it back towards the saucepan. Their improved gas ring burner looks like an upturned cone with the bottom sliced off. The inside wall of the cone is made of ceramic, and has ribs which curve up the inside surface. At the bottom of the cone is a conventional gas ring (see figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1: Ceramic cone
Figure 1: Ceramic cone
Figure 2: Thai bucket type stove
Figure 2: Thai bucket type stove
The saucepan is placed on the cone, and when the gas is burning it heats the pan directly as normal. But the gases that would escape nonnally heat up the ceramic so that it glows red, like the ceramic part of a gas fire, and radiates the heat back towards the saucepan. The ribs cause the flames and hot gases to move in a spiral direction inside the cone and so spend a longer time in contact with the cone and transfer more of their heat to the cone before escaping round the sides of the pan. The cone is designed to fit a wide variety of saucepan sizes.

Reproduced from New Scientist, Number 1856, 16 January 1993.

Editor Note: The principle of retaining the hot gases in contact with the pot, and using a ceramic cone to absorb and radiate heat to the pot, is already used in stoves such as the Thai design shown in figure 2. The Thai bucket design allows the pot to sit into the cone shaped and ribbed combustion chamber and so increase the heat transfer but has not yet adopted the spiral rib feature.

[top] [end]Contents: Boiling Point 32: Energy for the Household

.
.
Back to Basics in the Kitchen - Fuel Saving with Three Stones - Household Energy - Problems Policies and Prospects - The Twin-House Tests - Biogas in Rural Nigeria - Cooking Energy and Fuel in Dar es Salaam - Invisible Household Energy - Messages from the Hearth - Solar Villages - Save Fuel with a Fireless Cooker - Rural Electrification in Tanzania - Heat-storage Cookers in Nepal - The Fuelwood Issue Restated - Kerosene Stoves in Ethiopia - Charcoal from Coconut Shells - Fuel saving cone - Coir briquetting in Southern India progress report

edit this page

Page created: 28 August 2007; Last edited: 28 August 2007; Version: 0
Knowledge Bank text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Pagename: FuelSavingCone @HEDON: CBHA