Pot Materials and Heat Transfer

[RonM]

Well I've had some time to get back into stoving stuff. I been seeing a few articles about testing stoves and pots to go with them. Maybe this is old news to bpliters, but I haven't seen it in my wanderings about the site. It got me to thinking about the real numbers for various metals used and how much difference there would be - sure aluminum is a good conductor, but pots are generally thicker than titanium. Is it possible that the thinner titanium is reasonably close to the thicker aluminum pot?

Here are some numbers -

Heat Flow for Some Metals
k T1 T2 dT s q / A
Metal (W/m•K) (ºC) (ºC) (ºC) (in) (m) (kW/m2)
Al 212 20 500 480 0.04 0.001016 100157
Ti Pure 20 20 500 480 0.01 0.000254 37795
Ti Alloy 5.8 20 500 480 0.01 0.000254 10961
18-8 28 20 500 480 0.02 0.000508 26457

Rats - I can't see how to post a table. Anyhow each space should be a tab.

The bottom line is that even a 0.01" thick titanium alloy pot is around 10 times worse than a 0.04" thick aluminum pot and 0.02" stainless pot is about 4 times worse than 0.04" aluminum.

Interesting.

Actually after thinking about it - wow! I never would have expected that big of a difference.

Update -
I just happened to bump into this site -
http://thru-hiker.com/articles/debunkin ... _myths.php
In his testing he used a Primus Alpine Titanium canister stove. Tests showed no large difference in boiling time or fuel usage to boil. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of testing.

A great man once said that theory always falls down in practice, not usually or mostly, but always.

[zelph]

Glad to see you are up and about looking for some stove fun. With all the fires out west I'm hoping you are above the tree line

It takes me a looooong time to test a new stove design. I use only an aluminum pot for testing with an exception of a recent stainless steel one that I found an interest in. There are too many different sized pots out there, most are Ti nowadays. To expensive to do tests on them

The thru-hiker tests were interesting. The author can tell us anything he wants, how can we disprove his findings without doing the same test ourselves.

Yes, we have seen the charts showing the heat transfer abilities of different metals.

Canisters are "impingers" They pump the heat out with much vigor Just think how it would be if we were to hold an acetylene torch to the bottom of a cook pot....what would be the boil times experienced all the same no doubt just as in the canister.

I like user friendly methods of testing a stove east to reproduce time and time again. One common fuel and same 70 degree water temp for the start of the tests.

I recently did 3 tests using a thin wall stainless steel 3 cup capacity pot, 2 cups 70 degree water temp to start and 1/2 ounce denatured alcohol. All three test boiled using under 1/2 ounce of fuel. That made me smile to say the least. So, made a doubter out of me A doubter of heat transfer data.