Transport phenomena in a biomass plancha-type cookstove: Experimental performance and numerical simulations

In this work, the performance of a biomass plancha-type cookstove in terms of thermal and modified combustion efficiencies is presented. The analysis was carried out both from a numerical and experimental point of view. To simulate the fluid flow, heat transfer, and combustion phenomena, the numerical solution of mass, momentum, thermal energy , and chemical species conservation equations was implemented in the ANSYS Fluent TM software. In particular, two domains were considered: the internal (air) volume and the metallic (solid) comal (griddle cooking surface). Additionally, a set of experiments was specially designed to measure the temperature distributions on the comal and emissions through the chimney. Three different firepower values were experimentally evaluated: 3.78, 4.72, and 5.79 kW, and they were also numerically replicated. One of the key findings of this paper is the good comparison between the thermographic images and the numerical temperature distributions for the comal surface, a difference of 24 % and 18 % for both maximum and average temperatures, respectively, is found; whereas, differences for the CO 2 mass flow rates are in the range of 1 to 27 %. The good agreements validate the correct implementation of the CFD and experimental methodologies that we have developed for the evaluation of biomass plancha-type cookstoves.