Abstract:
Biomass is a potential source of energy which is used as fuel in cook-stoves in most rural areas of Bangladesh. However, due to low thermal efficiency and primitive design, these cook stoves causes degradation of natural biomass resources and environmental pollution. The solution to this problem is to introduce improved cook stove (ICS). Metal and non-metal improve cook stoves which are made in Bangladesh have been tested according to international test protocol. There has been substantial thermal efficiency found in metal type cook-stoves, which is within 35 to 40%, whereas the non-metal has only 20 to 30% efficiency. Despite the fact that the non-metal cook-stoves have lower thermal efficiency, but better emission performance found from this when there is a chimney attached, that is less toxic or hazardous elements exhaust from these type of stoves during operation. The metal type cook-stoves have also possessed the low emission characteristic if there is an external arrangement of draught control, which reduces the Carbon mono- oxide (CO) concentration about 2 ppm. To use the heat lost from the stove surface a new ICS has been developed with a Peltier device attached on the surface of the stove. The Peltier module works as thermo electric generator (TEG) and produce 0.5649 watt with a voltage of 2 volt from the dissipated heat.
