Thermal performance of cocoa pod cook stove

Abstract

Indonesia produces approximately 550.000 ton/year of cocoa pod waste from chocolate indus-try. The waste has a good potential to be used as a biomass feedstock of a cook stove. How-ever, thermal performance of the conventional cook stove is low when using a high moisture content feedstock, such as a cocoa pod waste. In addition, conventional cook stove generates high pollutant when high moisture content feedstock is used. In other to encounter the prob-lems, the present work develops gasifier based cocoa pod cook stove and investigates thermal performance of the stove at various equivalence ratios. The data collection is performed by varying equivalence ratio at 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6. Temperature of the stove, flame image, flame temperature, and water temperature are collected and used to analyze the thermal perfor-mance (i.e. useful heat and thermal efficiency) of the stove. The results reveal that a waste of cocoa pod can be used as a feedstock of gasifier based cook stove. Maximum useful heat of 1337.6 kJ and maximum thermal efficiency of 3.5% are obtained at optimum equivalence ratio of 0.5. To improve performance of the stove, the cocoa pod waste should be sun dried to reduce its moisture content and the porous burner may be applied as a burner of the gasifier based cook stove in the future work.