Laboratory demonstration and field verification of a Wireless Cookstove Sensing System (WiCS) for determining cooking duration and fuel consumption

Autor: O. Patange, Lokendra Singh, Martin Lukac, Abhishek Kar, Eric Graham, I. H. Rehman, Nithya Ramanathan
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: Energy for Sustainable Development. 23:59-67
ISSN: 0973-0826
Popis: With improved cookstoves (ICs) increasingly distributed to households for a range of air pollution interventions and carbon-credit programs, it has become necessary to accurately monitor the duration of cooking and the amount of fuel consumed. In this study, laboratory trials were used to create temperature-based algorithms for quantifying cooking duration and estimating fuel consumption from stove temperatures. Field validation of the algorithms employed a Wireless Cookstove Sensing System (WiCS) that offers remote, low-cost temperature sensing and the wireless transmission of temperature data to a centralized database using local cellular networks. Field trials included 68 unscripted household cooking events. In the laboratory, temperature responses of the IC body and that of a removable temperature probe (J-bar) followed well-known physical models during cooking, indicating that location of the temperature sensor is not critical. In the laboratory, the classification correctly identified active cooking 97.2% of the time. In the field, the cooking duration was not statistically different from that recorded by trained volunteers; the average difference between calculated and observed cooking times was 0.03 ± 0.31 h (mean ± SD). In the laboratory, energy flux from the IC was calculated using temperatures measured by the J-bar and on the IC body and found to be proportional to the total energy in the consumed fuel, with an r 2 correlation value of 0.95. In the field, the average fuel consumption was calculated to be 0.97 ± 0.32 kg compared to that recorded by volunteers of 1.19 ± 0.37 kg with an average difference between calculated and observed fuel mass of 0.21 ± 0.37 kg per event. Despite wide variation in observed cooking duration and fuel consumption per event, a relatively constant rate of fuel consumption of 0.48 kg h − 1 was calculated for users of the same type of IC.
Databáze: OpenAIRE