Multi-Scale Studies to Develop a Holistic Understanding of Solid Fuel Combustion at Residential Scale
type: CreativeWork
description: Nearly 3 billion people rely on solid fuels for their cooking and heating needs, classifying them as “energy poor”. This poverty can be attributed to several factors, including a lack of resources (fuel), inefficient infrastructure (production and distribution), limited purchasing power (poverty), and ill-devised policies. Solid fuels, such as biomass, coal, and dung cakes, are burned in inefficient cookstoves. They generate products of incomplete combustion (PIC), such as CO, particulate matter (PM), and CH4, causing household air pollution (HAP) whose adverse impacts on both health and the environment have been well established. HAP causes diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders (COPD), acute respiratory infections (ARI), tuberculosis, bladder and lung cancers, cataracts, and pneumonia. The World Health Organization has declared HAP to be the single largest environmental health hazard, accounting for 3.8 million deaths annually. Moreover, residential solid fuel combustion is a leading source of primary aerosols, which play important roles in atmospheric physics and chemistry, and affects regional and global climate with a net warming effect. To curb the adverse impacts of HAP, the United Nations has set a Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating energy poverty by 2030. Research on multiple fronts seeks to provide cleaner cooking energy by engineering either the cooking systems or the fuel. Developing more efficient solid fuel stoves, called improved cookstoves (ICS), has received the highest attention but the low adoption and still high emissions of ICS mean they alone will not eradicate energy poverty. This dissertation focuses on both options, i.e., ICS, and cleaner cooking fuel alternatives. Part 1 discusses the efficacy of current cookstove technology and the research needed to further advance the technology. Research on ICS is hampered by multiple concerns including a lack of fundamental research, real-time measurements to capture temporal…
abstract: Nearly 3 billion people rely on solid fuels for their cooking and heating needs, classifying them as “energy poor”. This poverty can be attributed to several factors, including a lack of resources (fuel), inefficient infrastructure (production and distribution), limited purchasing power (poverty), and ill-devised policies. Solid fuels, such as biomass, coal, and dung cakes, are burned in inefficient cookstoves. They generate products of incomplete combustion (PIC), such as CO, particulate matter (PM), and CH4, causing household air pollution (HAP) whose adverse impacts on both health and the environment have been well established. HAP causes diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders (COPD), acute respiratory infections (ARI), tuberculosis, bladder and lung cancers, cataracts, and pneumonia. The World Health Organization has declared HAP to be the single largest environmental health hazard, accounting for 3.8 million deaths annually. Moreover, residential solid fuel combustion is a leading source of primary aerosols, which play important roles in atmospheric physics and chemistry, and affects regional and global climate with a net warming effect. To curb the adverse impacts of HAP, the United Nations has set a Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating energy poverty by 2030. Research on multiple fronts seeks to provide cleaner cooking energy by engineering either the cooking systems or the fuel. Developing more efficient solid fuel stoves, called improved cookstoves (ICS), has received the highest attention but the low adoption and still high emissions of ICS mean they alone will not eradicate energy poverty. This dissertation focuses on both options, i.e., ICS, and cleaner cooking fuel alternatives. Part 1 discusses the efficacy of current cookstove technology and the research needed to further advance the technology. Research on ICS is hampered by multiple concerns including a lack of fundamental research, real-time measurements to capture temporal…
author: Patel, Sameer
language: English (en)
keywords: Cleaner fuel alternatives, Energy Poverty, Household air pollution, Improved cookstoves, Policy, Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering
date published: 2017-12-15T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:13:05Z
provider: Washington University in St. Louis
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Washington University in St. Louis

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7936/K7028QXR