Secondary Combustion Design Considerations

[Huntindog1]

Here is a Document that goes into some of the ideas of Secondary Combustion in these Non-Cat EPA Stoves. But notice its a 1984 Document so some advances have been made since then.

 

[Corey]

Interesting reading - thanks for posting. Though their results seem almost the exact opposite of what I would expect. In Table 1, they show the stove with uncontrolled air and no secondary combustion having the lowest emissions. Stoves with various secondary combustion and/or insulation configurations all have higher emissions ranging from almost 3x to over 7x on hydrocarbons. Table 2 shows the best emissions with the primary air 1/3 open and the secondary air completely shut. The conclusion has a sentence, "An almost universal characteristic of wood stoves at low burning rates is the abundance of excess air in the combustion products leaving the primary combustion zone." I would have thought almost the opposite...low burn rates in a smoke dragon mean an air-starved fire and smoky combustion which is cleaned up by a secondary air injection system.

 

[Huntindog1]

I think that the main objective of wood stove emissions is the reduction of particulates and smoke.

Particulates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates