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Comparison of Cookstove Emissions and Performance Results Using the Water Boiling Test v4 and the ISO 19867-1 Testing Protocols
Citation:
Champion, W., C. Williams, L. Virtaranta, M. Barnes, AND J. Jetter. Comparison of Cookstove Emissions and Performance Results Using the Water Boiling Test v4 and the ISO 19867-1 Testing Protocols. American Association for Aerosol Research, Portland, Oregon, October 14 - 18, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Household air pollution from solid-fuel stoves is the most significant environmental problem that affects human health worldwide. The WHO (World Health Organization) estimates that 3-4 million premature deaths annually are caused by household air pollution, mainly from emissions from cookstoves in the developing world. Additionally, household solid fuel use contributes significantly to ambient black carbon, and transboundary transport of pollutants from millions of stoves in Asia affects ambient air quality in the western U.S. The EPA ORD (Office of Research and Development) is conducting research and activities to address the problem in coordination with a much larger international effort led by the Clean Cooking Alliance. This poster presentation provides a comparison of stove emissions and performance data between the former widely-used test protocol (the Water Boiling Test), and the recently published ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Standard 19867-1.
Description:
Billions of people depend on open fires or simple stoves burning solid fuels each day for cooking. Household solid fuel use is the world’s leading environmental health risk factor and contributes significantly to ambient climate-forcing pollutant emissions. Laboratory testing has typically relied upon the Water Boiling Test (WBT) to both guide practices and allow a unified basis by which to report stove performance and emissions data. In 2018, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19867-1 “Harmonized laboratory test protocols” were released with the intention of establishing improved international comparability for data on air pollutant emissions, efficiency, safety, and durability. The present study compares ISO protocol emissions and efficiency data with WBT data previously collected in the same laboratory (United States Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) on the same fuel/stove types (liquefied petroleum gas, wood pellet, wood fan, wood rocket, wood traditional, and charcoal). On-going data analysis suggests that the ISO protocol results in higher carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter (PM) emissions rates/factors for advanced biomass stove types (wood pellet and wood fan) compared to the WBT. The inclusion of both start-up and shutdown periods within each ISO test phase allows stoves to operate at both “steady” and “transitional” conditions and contributes to these higher emission results for these specific stove types (particularly during shutdown). However, when the old ISO International Workshop Agreement (IWA) 11-2012 and the new ISO 19867-3 tier systems for CO/PM emissions are applied to both data sets, cookstove types are similarly ranked (e.g., tier-5 for LPG, tier-4 for wood pellet, tier-0 for wood traditional and charcoal). Therefore, this evaluation of the ISO protocol suggests that it provides data that are both a closer approximation to real-world emissions, and also relatively consistent with former WBT/ISO IWA data in terms of tier ratings for emissions and efficiency.