Portable Heat

Second only to auto accidents, the leading cause of deaths in America annually is portable heaters. Portable heaters cause approx 3000 deaths annually. Katrina did much less damage once in a decade that portable heaters do annually. The leading cause of portable heater deaths is portable electrical heaters.

The low cost, safe, clean, healthy heat is a corn stove that runs on local annually renewable, whole kernel, shelled corn.

The answer to portable heat is the NESCO Model 7100 Amaizablaze corn stove manufactured in Cookeville, Tennessee. www.cornstoves.info, www.msnusers.com/amaizablazecornstoves

I am constantly amazed at people who cry the merits of any stove that runs on a waste product that is in limited supply. You can never go beyond your available resource.

In this case corn that cannot be sold for feed or people food. The people who create this waste corn actually have to pay to dispose of it, and in some cases people buy it up and sell it to others for use in pellet stoves. The corn is spolied by fungus, weed killer, bug spray or genes from ??. That is why they dump it.

If the makers of this byproduct waste corn smarten up and reduce their waste to zero, where are you? Real edible corn (animal or man) is worth a lot more than fuel.

Current promotion on corn stoves is going to outrun the supply soon

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a waste product like spoiled corn in a cornstove and I think the concept is a good idea. That is of course, as aurizon pointed out, provided you don't over utilize your supply. Corn isn't available all over the world like it is in the USA so a cornstove would be little use in Australia but that doesn't mean you can't find some similar fuel that is available in your particular location. Provided you can burn the product cleanly I think utilizing an otherwise wasted renewable atmospheric CO₂ neutral fuel is a good idea and can be adapted for use around the world. I don't know how much energy you could expect to generate world wide with the technology but it would be worth investigating.

I need some education: Is corn stove a portable stove? Talking portability, Webster is far away from corn stoves and corn waste sacks...

Wangito.

What temperature are you wanting to maintain and for how long? Are there range limits that may spoil/damage your intended product in the canister?

All I want is luke warm water year round.

The canister must be portable, a stove will not work (sorry corn/wood suppliers).

Due to the fact that water and electricity don't mix well together, I would rather have some other means of ensuring water, within a closed container does not freeze.

The US armed forces have a system to feed something like 10 people all packaged in a single cardboard box. All you need to do is break a seal, pull on a tab and come back in 30 minutes to a freshly cooked ready to eat meal for 10.

Sounds like you are trying to do something similar. Since foodstuffs are perishable the military usually (but not always) sell of things that are getting close to their use by date, it might be possible to get hold of one of these packaged meal systems and de-engineer it. If you could it would certainly save and enormous amount of time.

I think Alcoa (or some other can supplier) offers a dual layer (soup?) can designed to self heat if a tap is pulled. A self contained hot meal for lunch. Temperature regulation is by mass; they only add enough chemicals to heat for the meal to an acceptable level. Of course no more heat is released when the chemical reaction is completed. Sounds like a small version of what you want.

The self heat can is for sell, in limited markets for coffee.

Who in his right mind would want to drink lukewarm coffee? , If you would say Tea, than I know where your market is.

And, if you only want Portable lukewarm coffee, why don't you just use a thermos? are you sure it's coffee?

Wangito.

Those two walled self heating tins of soup etc... were designed back in WW11!!

I don't think they caught on for the same reason that the self lighting cigarette didn't... they were expensive and dangerous to make and use!!

Sounds like what you want is a continuous heat source, not a one time only heater??

If you did only want a bit of heat once in a while I can think of loads of chemicals that would do that...

Gunpowder is one! magnesium, ohh so many elements to play with!!

John.

Thanks for the interesting replies - unfortunately it is not coffee or tea related.

I am working with a cylinder that is 20" in dia x 30" long, I require a long heat type application where the water stays at a constant temperature (hours, days, weeks).

I would like to have a slow release, unvented to atmosphere, it can not be hazardous because I will working with this cylinder (especially the water), it has to be portable.

I look forward to your replies.

With all due respect it sounds like you are caught between a rock and a hard place. You have an idea but cannot explain it well enough to still keep the likes of us from grabbing it and making money. And you don't understand enough about physics to solve the problem yourself. Maybe you need a consultant. They will, for a fee, (usually paid up front) explain why your idea will work, or will not, and ( if they are any good) just what the options might be. You will allways get very good advice here, for free, but it is really dependant on the details of the project. We don't even know just what we are trying to heat, or how hot, for how long.

Hand warmers generate heat at a constant rate over a long period of time. They work by oxidizing metals(typically powdered iron I think). The air supply is limited by some type of coating or membrane. I think that this would work nicely, and would be easy and cheap to design and manufacture.

It is likely patented, though, since those handwarmers are relatively recent.

Best Regards

Chris Becker

chemsimman@dynasimtech.com