About 2.8 billion people worldwide rely on the combustion of solid biomass fuels for cooking and heating. Traditional cookstoves can be less than 10% efficient. Though advances have been made towards electrification, projections indicate that more than 2.3 billion people will maintain a continued primary reliance upon solid fuel, or kerosene, combustion for cooking by the year 2030. Though progress has been made on the introduction of clean and more efficient cookstove devices, it currently results in more than 4 million premature deaths globally per year.
Recent evidence has suggested that the use of improved cookstoves may reduce fine particulate mass (PM 2.5) exposure. But this evidence has been mixed, with other studies showing reduced health impacts because improved cookstoves do not reduce concentrations of ultrafine particles. Gasification cookstoves are an example of improved cookstove technology, may be applied as a method of achieving improved operational performance while minimising emissions.
We examine here a small gasifier type of stove, the Lucia WorldStove, widely used in Africa from the viewpoint of gaseous and particulate emissions.