clean stove team symposium presentation

Second Annual Undergraduate Symposium on International Humanitarian Engineering

Department of Mechanical Engineering, MSU

the clean stove team – Andy, Carly, Dan, and Robert – gave a great presentation during their symposium on april 19^th.  they, too, still have Design Day coming up and will be putting together extensive documentation for ATC on their project, but the symposium really was the peak of their semester.

they started off the presentation with two videos.  one was a moving video about a Peruvian woman and her family and what their life was like before and after getting a clean stove.  with an open fire, she said, you could never get your skin clean, everything was black, she would get burned, and the kids were always sick.  the second video was a speech by Hillary Clinton, talking about the impact of the issue worldwide.  three billion people cook on open fires and dirty stoves, often with babies strapped on their backs.  this creates indoor air that has 200 times the particulate level that the EPA has deemed safe for breathing.  the latest numbers indicate that there are four million deaths per year due to indoor air pollution (more than AIDS and malaria deaths put together), and it is the number one cause of death for infants and children.

the team took us through their research and design process, and presented the theoretical workings of a TLUD stove.  they reviewed the equations governing heat energy, including energy generated, radiation, conduction, and convection.  they introduced us to the ceramicist they worked with for building some of the prototypes, and showed us other rapid prototyping they did to determine optimal hole placement in the combustion chamber.  this included physical models and test results.  an impressive part of the presentation was the show-and-tell of prototypes from all of their testing phases, including the final system design.  and they even used a smoke machine for full effect!

a tri-fold brochure of the project, which will be turned into a poster display for Design Day, was supplemented with two other videos.  one illustrated the secondary burn created by the stove, showing a glowing stick catching fire simply from the heated exhaust gases at the top of the stove.  the other video showed the hand manufacturing process of the clay chambers and the adobe bricks, both of which are realistic methods in the areas where this stove will be used.