Best Material for Backpacking Stove?

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Next year I'm finishing up my Manufacturing Engineering degree, which requires a senior project. I'm planning to make 3-5 backpacking stoves for mine. What thickness and type of material is best? Stainless is very cheap and probably handles the heat fairly well. Titanium is obviously lighter, but is more expensive and can be negatively affected by heat. I'd love to use Inconel but it would cost ~$150 for each stove body, vs 70 for titanium and next to nothing for 304 stainless. Have there been any problems with titanium body stoves burning through? Is there a limited life expectancy for some materials/thicknesses?
 

FlyGuy

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Congrats! That is a cool project to do btw.

I am NOT an engineer, so I can't really help you that much. I can tell you that I haven't ever heard of a problem with titanium in a backpack stove under normal use, but there are many others on here with far more experience than I.

Not sure how it works with senior projects, but titanium SOUNDS much cooler/hipper/more bad-ass than stainless does, which is all that really matters in the real world to get something sold.

Now, i dont know the 1st thing about Inconel or what job of properties it has. But, since it is so expensive, and since I've never even heard of it before, I'm already want to buy one of your exclusive 1st release inconel stoves. See how that works! HaHa! Gear heads are pretty easy. We like shiney new things.

Good luck to you! You probably already know this, but Lite Outdoors has some stove materials on their site that you can order for a diy project, so you might check them out if you havent already.

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Beendare

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Are you talking about a stove like the cylinders at 'Lite outdoors'...or butane cooking stoves like MSR ?

My experience with Ti has been fantastic in stoves- both the butane and the wood stoves.

Ti is amazing stuff.

SS is good, but over time it seems the heat seems to make it lose its corrosion resistance.

if you are talking about small stove design, the 'Zen Stoves" site on the web is a good place to start.
 
OP
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Are you talking about a stove like the cylinders at 'Lite outdoors'...or butane cooking stoves like MSR ?

My experience with Ti has been fantastic in stoves- both the butane and the wood stoves.

Ti is amazing stuff.

SS is good, but over time it seems the heat seems to make it lose its corrosion resistance.

if you are talking about small stove design, the 'Zen Stoves" site on the web is a good place to start.
Woodburning stoves. Carbide precipitation can kill the corrosion resistance of stainless if it gets hot enough. Titanium needs alloying to handle heat well, high heat will ruin its grain structure and it has very little red metal strength. I assume stove makers are using some alloy of titanium. Inconel is a nickel super alloy that can be heated and cooled almost endlessly with no ill effects. I may use it since I'm saving so much building them myself anyways, if I can find people to buy the others at cost before I start the project. But that's months away and I still have to get the project approved. I was hoping to find materials to stay away from, and decide if Inconel would be worth it. Looks like it may be.

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Napperm4

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Woodburning stoves. Carbide precipitation can kill the corrosion resistance of stainless if it gets hot enough. Titanium needs alloying to handle heat well, high heat will ruin its grain structure and it has very little red metal strength. I assume stove makers are using some alloy of titanium. Inconel is a nickel super alloy that can be heated and cooled almost endlessly with no ill effects. I may use it since I'm saving so much building them myself anyways, if I can find people to buy the others at cost before I start the project. But that's months away and I still have to get the project approved. I was hoping to find materials to stay away from, and decide if Inconel would be worth it. Looks like it may be.

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Most of the consumer available Ti foil on the market is lightly alloyed. It has been developed / distributed for use in medical applications. It’s definitely not aeronautical quality or alloy. That said, heat dispersion of titanium is superior to steel.

.005 stainless foil is primarily developed for levelling shims in machine Shop settings. By nature the alloy is corrosion resistant but the heat from repeated use does reduce the corrosion resistance. In addition with continued heat exposure you (crudely) annealing the material, increasing both hardness and overall brittleness.

What is the objective of your design for the final project? Are you simply looking at a superior material?

It’s worth noting that the nature and relative fragility of the foils used in traditional steel / titanium bodies categorizes either design ultimately as consumable. I haven’t experimented with either material long enough to determine any huge differential in longevity of usage since this is a hobby project for me.

I am sure a lot of the guys on here would be interested if your project extended to optimizing efficiency of the stoves while operational. Taking a scientific approach to the nuances in performance based on shape (cylinder vs box), firebox volume, optimized air flow generated from placement / size of fresh air intake vs exhaust diameter / length of the chimney. Since most of the stoves on the market that I know of are cottage industries and based more on trial and error than theoretical data and proven, controlled trials something on that approach might be fun and help you market the product if you take it to market.

Most stoves don’t burn hot for a long time. Hahaha perhaps a solar powered log loader for night time use as an accessory?

Interesting project and good luck!


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OP
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Thanks for the input Napper. I have thought about optimizing the shape for air flow, and have a design in mind. I've figured out how I want to do the damper and just have a couple more things to think through. Not having any experience with a backpacking stove myself, I figure I'll make a couple cheap prototypes before I go cutting up any Inconel sheet. The idea behind the Inconel is to stay at or within a couple ounces of other materials with no risk of burn through or degradation of the material. You hit on the other problem with stainless; it distributes heat very poorly. I'll have to investigate the properties of Monel 400 and Inconel to see how they compete in that department. Should be interesting to see, I'll probably post a thread with my findings when I get rolling.
 

Napperm4

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Thanks for the input Napper. I have thought about optimizing the shape for air flow, and have a design in mind. I've figured out how I want to do the damper and just have a couple more things to think through. Not having any experience with a backpacking stove myself, I figure I'll make a couple cheap prototypes before I go cutting up any Inconel sheet. The idea behind the Inconel is to stay at or within a couple ounces of other materials with no risk of burn through or degradation of the material. You hit on the other problem with stainless; it distributes heat very poorly. I'll have to investigate the properties of Monel 400 and Inconel to see how they compete in that department. Should be interesting to see, I'll probably post a thread with my findings when I get rolling.

Hahaha. As a fellow enginerd I am excited to see the build thread.

When I was playing around with initial designs in my garage for airflow optimization I picked up some cheap burner cover plates and stainless dinner plates as end caps for the round stoves, some .005 stainless shim stock to use as the chimney and experimented with body size / shape using some cheap aluminum roof flashing from Lowe’s.

The aluminum obviously deformed badly or burned through completely in about an hour when I tested them but I was able to test a lot of different prototype configurations for less $100.

I have never worked with Inconel so no real comment there but eventually settled on titanium for my DIY stoves. I also have a small cylinder stove from lite outdoors that I have used for a while. My builds have mostly been just to occupy my curious mind.

I have a few comments throughout rokslide on various diy stove threads and if you have any other questions I have built a few backpack stoves, mainly cylinder as well as some large, heavy duty stoves for our canvas wall tents so feel free to pm if you have any other questions you think I can add to from experience or help with sourcing materials.

Cheers


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AdamW

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Only on Rokslide can you find guys nerding out on the properties of the metal used to make stoves. I love it!

From both a resale (if that's partly your goal) perspective, I'd be leaning toward Ti, but hell you clearly know more about it than most of us doofuses. :D
 

Napperm4

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You guys seriously have no idea how excited I am reading this thread and knowing I am not the only one who has laid awake at night in bed trying to apply the coefficient of thermal expansion to my TI stove compensating for the differential of the cable rings and wondering if reducing the radius of the body or rings slightly to compensate would result in controlling fugitive emissions and eeking the slightest improvement in performance is possible, or how many nanograms I could shave off by doing so.

I plan to geek out as long as this thread stays alive.

* Disclosure - no, shockingly, i am not single nor living in my mother’s basement.


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Napperm4

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Only on Rokslide can you find guys nerding out on the properties of the metal used to make stoves. I love it!

From both a resale (if that's partly your goal) perspective, I'd be leaning toward Ti, but hell you clearly know more about it than most of us doofuses. :D



Hahaha. You want to hear nerding out? Come listen to the .270 vs .308 debates at my elk camp. I like to think copious amounts of scotch make me smarter


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Beendare

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Ok wood stove then.

I've built 2 used them for a lot of years. One was SS, the other TI. I sold one...and the other got stomped by a loaded horse....I can tell you that SS shim doesn't do well vs. horseshoes on rocky ground.

The one I currently use is TI from Lite outdoors and I know you wouldn't want to copy something but his damper is fantastic and probably eliminates the need for a spark arrestor. I have a pic of it around here on my other computer showing the air flowing around and over the damper.

It still might be worth looking over the stove designs on that Zen stove page as it might give you an idea. I will be interested to see if you come up with something new.......good luck.
 
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