Papers presented to the 11th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 20-23 July 2015.
In Zambia wood fuel, as a forest resource currently accounts for
80% of the country’s total energy consumption at household
level. About 60.9% of households use firewood for cooking and
24.3% use charcoal while only 13.8% use electricity. Further in
rural areas, 87.7% use wood for cooking, 9.5% use charcoal and
only 1.5% used electricity. Traditional earth charcoal kilns are
the dominant method used in charcoal production, they incur
minimal construction costs for rural communities, but have low
conversion efficiencies, ranging from 6 to 12%.This causes high
annual rate of deforestation due to wood harvesting. For every
ton of charcoal produced using traditional kiln depletes 0.1
hectares of woodlands. Zambia has 300 000 hectares per annum
rate of deforestation that is increasing at rate of 4% per annum.
This research was about determining the effect of moisture
content and log diameter on the conversion efficiency of drum
type charcoal making kilns by comparative studies in the field.
The drum kiln is intended for use at the household level in periurban
and rural areas. The log diameters used in the
experimentation ranged from 0.04 m to 0.16 m on an average
scale. The moisture content of the wood was determined by oven
dry method (ASTM-D-4442) which yielded moisture content
ranges of 26.92 wt. %, 9.42 wt. %, 8.63 wt. % and 9.06 wt. %
respectively.
