The past decades we persued several ideas and conducted multiple projects with our industrial partners. This shall give you a brief overview of what has happened. You might take this also for starting points of your idea!

Thermal storage. Storage of energy is an important task for stove technology. It allows to accumulate heat released from the wood combustion and dissipate to a later time. Thus, the thermal storage balances the energy release in order not to overheat the living room but to create a comfort level. Recent ideas:

• increasing the energy density of such storages for less mass (by using e.g. phase change materials)
• making the energy releasable on the press of a button and allowing the user to decide on the moment when to release the heat (using supercooled phase change materials)

Cooling. Cooling by using a renewable energy source is a sustainable way to counter the increasing need of cooling in summer times. Similar like the self-cooling beer keg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_HFZff69yQ), a chemical heat pump, which uses the evaporation energy of water to cool the living room can be operated using the heat of wood combustion.

Electrical power production. Combined heat and power is not only a topic for large scale power plants. Also in small scale down to couple of Watts, electrical energy production from thermal energy is feasible using thermal electrical generators (TEGs) or even engines (Stirling, micro-turbines,…).

Emission of air pollutants. During the combustion process, air pollutants like fine particulate matter and even carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons may be emitted. To mitigate or abate these emissions, several strategies are pursued:

• optimization of the combustion process to avoid formation of air pollutants. For this, air supply distributed amongst primary (responsible for converting the biomass into a gas) and secondary (responsible for gas phase combustion) streams, turbulence and temperature conditions are crucial.
• integration of abatement technologies downstream of the combustion process (catalysts, filtering technologies,…). These technologies are on the one hand very effective, though their costs are too high or the handling is too complex in order to explain the users the benefit.

User behavior. In particular for firewood stoves, the user behavior is of major concern when it comes to emission formation and energy efficiency. Therefore former developments addressed either the robustness of the technology against mal-operation or measures to increase the uptake and perception of the operating manual (e.g. quick-user guides, augmented reality for ignition, …).