With the advancement of the combustion technology and innovative approach towards applying the known principle of cookstove designing, cookstove technology has gain the boost and now four fold improvement in the overall thermal efficiency has been achieved as compare to the traditional tri-stone cookstove.
Apart from the type quality of the fuel used, design of the cookstove chamber is the deciding factor for the associated emission causing by the fuel combustion. So in order to meet the emission standards and compare the different model of the cook stoves within the same category, standard emission testing protocol and procedure need to be follow.
Based on international standards of emission and combustion, a standard testing protocol and procedure is under development. An international conference, organized by USAID in 1982, has resulted three distinct testing/evaluation techniques (the 1985 VITA protocol). Now the revised VITA protocol and procedure has been adopted as testing protocol by various organizations across the world. The testing procedure was again revised in 2003 by Dr. Kirk Smith at University of California at Berkeley, Shell Foundation, and ARC and developed the Excel spreadsheets for the calculation. Meeting held at the annual ETHOS conference in Kirkland, WA is one of the links in the series of effort and attention given by various organizations and countries towards the development of standard testing protocol.
The intention of all the conferences, meetings and seminars is to continually evolve and improve emission evaluation techniques and procedures as per the new technological development in the cookstove field. Decades of input from the field's leading experts have led to the most useful protocols for stove testing and evaluation.
Before launching the cookstove to the market, cook stove need to go through three distinct test procedures, includes both lab and field test. These are:
- The Water Boiling Test (WBT) – This is a laboratory test that simply simulates the cooking process. Here water in the cooking pot is heated to evaluate the thermal efficiency and associated emission generation during the combustion. Other than above, WBT test helps to provide an initial assessment of stove performance, design evaluation during the development, compare the effectiveness as compared to the different designs for performing the same task and ensures to meet the design specifications.
- The Controlled Cooking Test (CCT) – This is a field test that analyzes how the new stove performs compared to common or traditional cooking methods. Stoves are compared as local cooks prepare a traditional food. The test helps to compare the amount of fuel used by different stoves to cook a common food and compares the time needed to cook that food. Also the investigation on the emissions made during the test of the old and new stove is done.
- The Kitchen Performance Test (KPT) – This is a community field test that measures fuel use in homes after stoves have been distributed to ensure real-world savings and use.
All these tests helps to validate the stove from initial optimization of the technical design in the laboratory under the controlled artificial atmosphere to the final field testing with lot of actual field variables, affecting the cookstove performance. All the tests are performed in series, moving from one to the next after satisfactory results are achieved.
Those who want to secure the carbon credit; they need to go through one more test, Gold Standard Cook Stove Methodology. The Gold Standard Methodology is essentially an extended KPT.
There are four centre has been recognized by the MNRE, GoI for the testing and certification of the cookstove. These are:
- for East zone - IMMT Bhubaneswar
- for West zone - MPUAT Udaipur
- for North zone - IIT Delhi
- for South zone - IISc Bangalore
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