SPITFIRE: Self-Powered Biomass Stove For Remote Communities

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£3,789,975

March 31, 2023

March 31, 2025

Globally, 3 billion people have no access to clean cooking, relying instead on dirty-burning charcoal as primary cooking and water heating fuel. The release of CO and PM (linked to \>4M deaths/year) led the WHO to declare pollution caused by unclean cooking as "the world's largest single environmental health risk". As its alternative, the use of firewood substantially influences deforestation, due to unregulated foraging for firewood, while negatively impacting wildlife.

Quality of life in Sub-Saharan Africa is also severely impacted by lack of (domestic and institutional) access to electricity. According to the WDI, 72% of Zambia's population has no access to electricity.

The SPITFIRE-stove will address both the major unmet need for clean cooking solutions and the lack of access to electricity. This will be achieved by developing an affordable, low-emission, biomass-pellet-burning clean-cookstove that generates a no-added-fuel electricity surplus. The institutional SPITFIRE-stove will use temperature-controlled airflow regulation to ensure complete combustion to eliminate \>80% of CO and particulate-matter emissions compared to traditional combustion. Airflow regulation will be via an electric fan, powered by a thermoelectric generator (TEG), which will both power the electric fan and provide an electricity surplus for storage in a low-voltage battery with charge-out ports for charging/powering small electronic devices. Furthermore, cooling of the TEG by an integrated water-cooling system will deliver a free supply of heated water.

SPITFIRE will develop:

-Novel high-temperature thermoelectric materials and production processes for the TEGs,

-15kW burner technology that allows intelligent, temperature-controlled airflow regulation;

-Institutional-scale, sustainable biomass-pellet-burning stove.

Integration of the scaled-up stove and burner design with the novel high-temperature TEG module via hot- and cold-side heat receptors/exchangers will require close collaboration between the partners and multiple iterations of system level modelling and simulation. The SPITFIRE project ultimately aims to deliver a final stove design, assemble 30 demonstrator products, and validate stove performance in field trials within institutional kitchens in public services and local enterprises such as restaurants, schools, and orphanages, in our primary target market, Zambia.

The SPITFIRE-stove will therefore address the clean cooking and energy dilemma by;

-Delivering clean, sustainable biomass-burning cooking stoves with low emissions,

-Delivering cooking stoves that will utilise reduced-cost biomass pellet fuels that are approximately one-third of the price of LPG and half of the price of charcoal, Ensuring reliability of energy supply for Zambia and beyond by utilising locally-sourced sustainable forestry for the biomass pellets.