We design all our products to be robust and hardwearing, to stand up to the test of the most extreme adventures you can throw at them, and a stove that warps doesn't make the cut. In short, a stainless steel Frontier Stove or other stove of similar design would be most inefficient and disappointing as a heat source. In a tent, this means that the top of your tent will get warm but the lower parts (usually where you're sitting or sleeping) will stay chilly. The exterior of the stove will also heat some of the air in close contact with it and this will rise by convection to warm an enclosed space such as a tent or be lost to the atmosphere if outdoors. When the heat produced inside a stove cannot leave the stove easily either by radiant emission or conduction, the majority of the heat must therefore be expelled by convection (the upward flow of hot gases) and leaves the stove inside the chimney to be wasted in the air above. Quality stainless saucepans often sandwich a disc of aluminium (a very good conductor) into the pan's base to help spread heat evenly for cooking and to prevent distortion. If the cooking surface warps, the good contact with the flat base of a cooking pot essential for effective heat transfer by conduction is lost. As it is unable to emit this excess heat away or conduct it to other areas and because stainless also has a high thermal expansion rate (meaning the metal expands when hot), the result is likely to be metal distortion or warping caused by the unequal expansion. It is also a relatively poor conductor, which means that areas of the stove in close proximity to burning fuel will reach very high temperatures while other parts won't, rather than distributing the heat evenly across the whole stove. So why can't we use stainless steel to construct the Frontier Stove? Most of the warmth you feel while sitting around a fire or stove outdoors is radiant heat - heat transmitted outwards via infrared radiation - and shiny stainless steel is a very bad emitter of radiant heat. It is these invisible factors that are of vital importance when designing a stove. These include heat conductivity, expansion rate, emissivity, reflectivity, and melting point. The correct choices will ultimately determine the efficiency of the stove and its success as a heat source.Īll metals have different properties of weight, strength, stiffness, finish etc, but they also have differing thermal properties. A good stove will use the best design and the materials with the best properties to achieve whatever the desired purpose or aim is. The target may be you, the bottom of a kettle, the space inside a tent or perhaps all three. The purpose of any type of stove is to enable and control the efficient transfer of energy stored in unburned fuel into heat directed at the desired target. In this blog post, we get technical about the properties of stainless steel and go in-depth about why we don't make stainless stoves. The answer is simple: while it may well look pretty in a photo, it doesn't work very well as a stove. Stainless is a great material: it's stain and rust-resistant and looks sleek. We are sometimes asked why we don't offer a version of the Frontier Stove or Frontier Plus made from stainless steel.
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