Developement of porous media burner operating on waste vegetable oil

Highlights: • Steam was successfully applied to promote combustion of WVO. • A specially designed porous domain was an essential element for stable combustion of WVO. • The performance of WVO burner was in the range of cooking stove. • Nozzle clog up in domestic WVO burner can be avoided when replacing it with a steam-assisted nozzle. - Abstract: A newly designed cooking stove using Wasted Vegetable Oil (WVO) as fuel was introduced. Porous media, containing 2 cm diameter of spherical ceramic balls, was used as a flame stabilizer. Steam was successfully applied in a burner at this scale to atomize WVO droplet and entrain air into the combustion zone as well as to reduce soot and CO emission. DIN EN 203-1 testing standard was adopted and the experiment was conducted at various firing rate with the water flow rate at 0.16, 0.20 and 0.22 kg/min. Temperature, emissions, visible flame length, thermal efficiency as well as combustion efficiency were evaluated. Under the current WVOB design, it was suitable to operate the burner at the range of nominal firing rate between 325 and 548 kW/m² with water flow rate of 0.16 kg/min, at burner height to diameter ratio of 0.75, giving CO and NO_x emissions up to 171 and 40 ppm, respectively (at 6% O₂). Thermal efficiency was at around 28% where the combustion efficiency was approximately at 99.5%. The performance of WVO burner could be improved further if increasing the H/D ratio to 1.5, yielding thermal efficiency up to 42%.