Due to increasingly rapid changes in regulatory and market requirements for wood-burning stoves, continuous development is essential for maintaining market competitiveness. Specifically for residential wood stoves, it is necessary to guarantee an optimal compromise between low emissions, high efficiency, adjustable heat output, ease of access to the combustion chamber, and a large, clear viewing window.
To achieve this, precise knowledge of internal flow and combustion conditions is indispensable. For some time, fluid simulations have been utilised in the development of these devices. Within a research project, numerical and experimental results from the Emden University of Applied Sciences were compared against further flow simulations conducted by FlowMotion.
The particular challenges in these simulations were the geometric complexity and the requirement to account for the following fluid mechanical effects:
Combustion (gas mixture of various substances) of a wood stack
Variable gas density and resulting buoyancy effects
Heat conduction through diverse materials
Thermal radiation including absorption, transmission, and reflection.
Despite these numerical challenges for fluid simulations, the combined expertise of all parties involved in the research project demonstrated the value of flow simulations in stove development and identified new approaches for the further reduction of pollutant emissions.
