Origo 3000 alcohol burner with air injection - an experiment.
Lately, I have been pondering on how to improve my Origo 3000 alcohol stove. The thing is, this stove is so simple, safe and reliable in use that I don’t want to throw it away.
Its big drawback is that it has an incomplete combustion when running at anything over the lowest setting: The flame is yellow, which is a typical sign of rich burn; plenty of fuel, but not enough oxygen. All other stoves running on a liquid fuel solves the task by turning the fuel into gas before injecting it into the air, but most of them need some sort of pressure.
Now I decided to try doing it the other way; injecting air into the rich flame to complete the combustion. This is how it is done in modern wood stoves/heaters, and the result is that the wood burns with a blue flame. The heaters stay clean, and so do the chimneys - and the heaters produce much more heat on a sack of wood.
Tonight I took a piece of copper tube with me to the harbour workshop and prepared it as on the photo below, with five 1mm holes in it, and the end closed (pinched flat) in the vice. This I took on board in Ingeborg, together with my car tyre pump. The two other photos below tell the story (sorry about the poor quality, I only had my old mobile phone). With the burner turned high, the flame was, as always, bright yellow. When I connected the tube to the pump and injected air into the flame, the flame instantaneously turned blue and intense, sounding like a gas flame. I only operated the pump very slowly. I bet the pressure was no higher than we can blow ‘by mouth’. I find this experience to be very encouraging: I will shape another tube into a circular shape with about twenty 1mm holes in it. This, hopefully will ensure that the whole flame gets enough air to stay blue all over.
Then is the challenge of finding a cheap and quiet 12V fan which draw little power. Anyway, if the battery is low, the Origo will work in ‘the old way’ without air injection.
Any suggestion about that fan/air-pump?
Arne
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