This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), to design "rocket stoves" in the village of Mwamgongo and top-light updraft design (TLUD) gasification stoves in the village of Kalinzi. The goal is to create a healthier, more energy-efficient cooking apparatus that these villagers will accept and use. HELP students are filing these dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their eighth blog post for Scientific American.
Time crawls from morning to night, but the familiarity of each day blurs one week into the next. This is unfortunate because I have a stove to build. "Build" is actually the wrong word. We built stoves last year. This year we're going to design a stove.
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There is no set design process, no formula to follow, but what is important is understanding what the user wants. This means it's time to talk to the experts: Women who spend up to seven hours a day cooking for their families in smoke filled kitchens. Last year we built stoves for a pilot group of 25 households, which would be the basis for design feedback this year. I grabbed my pen and notebook and left the field station eager to see some familiar faces and hear their impressions of the stove.
Running to greet us as we left the field station was a young boy named Kilai. He ran over with a huge smile on his face spewing greetings in Swahili and a few broken phrases we had taught him in English last year. “Good Evening,” he beamed. I checked my watch, yup, it was 8:30 a.m. Kilai is probably about 10 years old (he doesn't actually know) and is my favorite person in Mwamgongo. His life story reflects some of the shortcomings of the educational system in Tanzania. Kilai caught polio as a child, and it left him with serious learning disabilities. Because the school in Mwamgongo has no resources for special needs students, Kilai dropped out of school at around nine years old unable to read, write or perform simple arithmetic. Kilai spends his days hanging around our house, waiting until he is old enough to become a fisherman. What he lacks in formal education, he makes up for in personality. Kilai is loved by everyone in the village and has appointed himself our "side-kick."
With Kilai in the lead, we set off to survey the village. What I saw in the field was disheartening. People were not using the rocket stoves, but, thankfully, they had many complaints. The primary problem was that every stove we observed was damaged in some way. The main difficulty was that the "top knobs"—balled up pieces of clay that elevate the pot off of the stove permitting airflow into the combustion chamber—had broken off. This limited the flow of oxygen, which inhibited combustion. The result was burning stoves that smoked a lot. People also complained that the firewood intake was too small to accommodate their firewood and that the sticks needed to be pushed in every few minutes, which made it difficult to walk away from the stove. We also observed that the "superstructure" (surrounding mud cement bricks) of many stoves had broken, severely weakening the stoves. It was depressing to see such poor results after the first year, but I understand that failure is part of any design process and the feedback we got will certainly inspire a new design.
I took what we learned from the test group and put it into a specifications table. A specification is a characteristic of the stove that can be evaluated. By standardizing the criteria you use to evaluate the stove, you can accurately compare the performance of different designs. For example, the time the stove takes to boil one liter of water is a specification of the stove that can be measured (in minutes). Thus, we can use "boil time" as a point of comparison between different designs. Moreover, from user group surveying, minimum values for the specifications can be determined. One example is that users may demand that the stove boil one liter of water in less than 10 minutes. The design of the stove would then need to meet that quantitative value in order to appeal to the users. The specification method allows for formalized testing and reduces the ambiguity when comparing designs.
posts
Specification
Justification for Specification
Metric of Evaluation (based on user group surveying)
Cooking Performance
Stove must cook traditional meals
User group testing. Binary yes/no
Boil Time
Stove must cook food at a pace that is acceptable to the user
Boil time for 1 liter of water must be < 10 mins, 3-stone stove boils in 7-10 minutes
Efficiency
Stove must be as efficient as possible to reduce fuel wood consumption
At least 20 percent (twice as efficient as 3-stone stove)
Cost
Must be affordable by all people
Must cost less than 3000Tsh per stove (< 2 US dollars)
Durability
Stove must last for a long time with limited maintenance
Stove should last 2 years without maintenance
Ease of Construction
Stove must be easy to construct and easy to repair
Must use locally available materials and building techniques. Building time including materials gathered < 10 hours. Cost of maintenance after two years < $1 time of maintenance should be < 5 hours
Aesthetics
Stove should be visually appealing
Does user group approve? Binary Y/N
Burn Protection
Stove should prevent against burns
After cooking cycle (2 hours) outside superstructure of stove should not be able to burn. Binary Y/N
Indoor air pollution
Particulates should be reduced, CO emissions should be reduced
Testing with pariculate and CO monitors. More research must be done to find acceptable levels of emissions
Size
Stove should be sized to fit in existing kitchens and should not be too tall (women are used to working on short stoves)
Maximum height 40 cm
Maximum width 60 cm
Maximum length 60 cm
Firewood size
Must be able to accept firewood that people normally use
Must accept firewood sticks that are 12 cm wide
Burn time
People like to put wood in their stove and walk away. Stove must be able to burn for an acceptable period of time between wood additions
Must burn for longer than 5 maintenance free minutes
The values for this chart were derived from extensive discussion with the 25-sample user group. Hopefully, this chart gives some insight into the criteria we're using to evaluate the stoves. At this point, we need to start designing. If these specifications are unattainable then my time will be limited in Mwamgongo but I'm confident we can meet most of these specs and will have a successful stove, it's just going to require some serious work.
Image courtesy of Wendy Hado