globusjournal

It was established in various literature that solid waste accumulation and scarcity of non-renewable fuels become major problems of most countries.  Concurrent to this, there is the growing problem of solid waste accumulation, i.e., paper. The purpose of the study was to marginally subside the volume of paper waste, and at the same time minimize somehow wood trees’ logging by designing and building a prototype of a semi-automatic paper stove. The theoretical design of the prototype is composed of: Stand Base, Vertical Stand Connector, Water Reservoir, Ash Screen, Furnace, Furnace Cap, four Pushers, four Pusher Covers, and four Hoppers. Before starting with the design, the technical feasibility was assured through computing and comparing the theoretical fuel mass consumption per semester and the estimated accumulated paper per semester. In designing the prototype, the fuel mass consumption per operation of the paper stove was taken into account to determine the appropriate sizes of the paper stove parts. This helped in computing the ideal number of hoppers and their height considering that empty cans of 240 mL del Monte juice had been used. Then, after the prototype was designed, the fabrication process in the researcher’s personal shop started. Employing experimental research design, scientific sampling method, specifically systematic sampling and central tendencies analysis, data were obtained from 30 cooking trials from both charcoal and paper stoves.

From the results of the study, it was found out that the charcoal stove reaches the maximum temperature at a faster rate compared to the paper stove and that the latter has no significant difference with the former in terms of the maximum temperature and of the temperature mean. In addition, the operational cost ratio between the semi-automatic paper stove and the charcoal stove is less than one. These results showed that it is feasible for the paper stove to cook rice using paper as fuel, reaching the highest temperature similar to the charcoal stove, and that cooking rice using paper stove is much cheaper as compared to using the charcoal stove.  From the initial ambient temperature, the core temperature rises until the water from both pots were fully evaporated, then fans of both stoves were shut off. The core temperature then goes down, and the cooking process ends after 27 minutes.

Keywords: Prototype, Semi-Automatic, Paper Stove, Domestic Use, Experimental Research Design.