Experimental and CFD analysis to study the effect of inlet area ratio in a natural draft biomass cookstove

The biomass cookstoves have been used in rural areas for the time immemorial. New developments in cookstove design are needed due to cookstoves impact on the user’s health and the environment. This paper presents a novel computational method to understand the working of a cookstove. The effect of inlet area ratio on various performance parameters is studied through experimentation and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The steady-state model predicts the temperature profile at different locations inside the stove for different inlet area ratios (IARs), which is validated against the experimental data. The combustion phenomenon is simulated using non-premixed combustion and k-ε turbulence models. The critical value of IAR is found to be 0.70, up to which the firepower and flame temperature are increasing. For IAR less than 0.7, the firepower decreases, flame temperature saturates, and the CO emissions continue to rise. Results showed that CFD is a useful tool with adequate accuracy to understand the thermal and emissions behaviour of the cookstove. CFD can be used as an aid to the experimentation for preliminary analysis or as a standalone tool once validated experimentally.